Developing teacher professional learning resources and opportunities in refugee/displacement contexts: Ensuring holistic learning through participatory design and co-creative processes

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Teaching and Teachers

Proposal

In this presentation, processes, products, and outcomes from a professional development (PD) open education resources (OERs) design project within global displacement/refugee education contexts will be shared. Methodologies, including participatory design, co-creation, and translanguaging, will be examined as contributing factors for sustainable, holistic learning and leadership with, by, and for teachers to transform education for more equitable futures.

UNESCO has estimated a need for 69 million new teachers to meet SDG4’s promise of inclusive and equitable education for all (UNESCO, 2016), a need proportionally greater in displacement/refugee contexts (Burns & Lawrie, 2015). Working with educators of refugee and national citizen backgrounds situated in Lebanon, Kenya, and Niger, the presenter co-facilitated development of OER professional learning courses, workshops, handbooks, micro-credentials, and facilitation guides with teachers for teachers serving marginalized and vulnerabilized learners of refugee, national, and transnational backgrounds. The processes of creation and the OERs created will be shared in this session to illustrate how participatory design and co-creation can have sustainable, holistic, and collective impact in complex learning ecosystems. Findings from an external evaluation will be shared, highlighting the transformative potential as well as the challenges and yet to be fully articulated possibilities of supporting teachers through teacher-created PD materials in fragile, lower resourced, and displacement contexts.

Sustainable Learning, defined by Woolis (2017) as: transparent, agile, adaptable, and measurable, “harnesses[ing] the digital speed of knowledge creation and the attendant acceleration of learning cycles” (p. 43) to support learning and sharing across spacetime, was central to this virtual global project. Using the five domains of Sustainable Learning—purposeful pedagogy, systems thinking, looped learning, democratic engagement, and digital inclusion (Woolis, 2022)—staff from an international non-profit worked with teachers, as project fellows, over a period of 18 months to design PD OERs focused on sustainable, holistic learning. Participatory design and participatory research principles and processes (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016; Bustamante Duarte et al., 2018) informed the co-creative process that centered teacher experience, voice, and leadership in local, national, and transnational contexts. Translanguaging (García & Wei, 2018; Blackledge & Creese, 2017) was natural and essential in this global community of practice.

In this presentation, the initial outcomes of the project will be shared along with questions which guide the presenter and the participants to consider what co-creative and participatory processes look like within inequitable global realities and how they might disrupt problem-solution narratives driven by North-South relations to engender inter-relational, complex, and nuanced explorations of possibility within teacher learning and teacher leadership ecosystems. Questions of impact on learners, both teachers and their students, will be explored in light of larger ecosystem factors including economic, political, social, and public health upheavals and multiple shifts in education policy and practice at national and global levels. Participants will be invited to consider how they might adapt project resources/processes to their unique contexts to support holistic professional learning opportunities that center teachers’ transworlding (Koyama, 2020) and, thus, sustain transnational educators as they uplift each other, the profession, and the students they work with and for each day.

Author

• Julie Kasper, University of Arizona