Building an educational research agenda for Jordan: Challenges and lessons learned from the co-construction process with cross-country and local stakeholders

• In Event: Education research designed for uptake: Co-constructing anactionable research agenda for Education Research in Conflict and Protracted-Crisis (ERICC)

Proposal

Situated in the heart of the Middle East, Jordan is a relatively small country with few natural resources, a fact that has pushed its government focus on education as a hopeful means to develop the economy and provide for the populace. The kingdom has welcomed refugees fleeing regional conflicts since its founding in 1946. Today, more than one-third of Jordan’s 10 million residents are not Jordanian. The country is home to approximately 2.3 million UNRWA-registered Palestinian refugees, 1.5 million Syrians, and sizable groups of UNHCR refugees from Iraq, Yemen, and Sudan. Most refugees (83%) live in urban areas while only 17% reside in Jordan’s 10 Palestinian camps or 5 Syrian camps. This means that, despite avoiding direct involvement in conflict, Jordan is in the state of a protracted crisis that affects the education of all its inhabitants. Double-shift schools, limited resources, and overcrowded classrooms have compromised the reforms and progress Jordan managed worked toward in the last two decades.
To address this challenge, the country research team, a national NGO working to improve education in Jordan, worked with its cross-country partners and local stakeholders to develop a national research agenda. This paper will discuss (1) the process of working simultaneously with local stakeholders and international partners to develop common tools, procedures, and research agendas and (2) the lessons learned in building such multi-level, collaborative partnerships to guide research development.
In the case of Jordan, the inception period for the project started in April 2022 and culminated in November 2022 with the finalization of a research agenda for the country, created in collaboration with key local stakeholders. The first step in this process was to take stock of the current research, stakeholders, data systems, and service provision in the country. Through this initial “country scan” process, the research team collaborated with its cross-country partners - teams in Nigeria and Bangladesh, as well as cross-country team - to develop common tools, procedures, and reporting templates. The result: a common understanding and comparable data on the research evidence gaps and contexts across countries.The paper highlights some of the minor modifications made in these tools and processes for the Jordanian context, taking into account the small, centralized nature of its education system. In addition, challenges in co-developing tools with the cross-country partners guided will be highlighted, including conflicting definitions, differing organizational capacities, and pre-existing stakeholder relationships which made some country modifications and compromises necessary.
Using these tools and processes developed collaboratively with cross-country partners, the research team engaged a range of stakeholders in three national workshops to co-develop a research agenda. During these events, the team shared the results of its ERICC country scan and participants worked together to critically discuss gaps in research and provision as well as brainstorm and prioritize research areas that ultimately led to the creation of the Jordan Research Plan. The final section of the paper will highlight the challenges and lessons learned from this engagement process to support other researchers attempting to co-produce research with local stakeholders.

Author

• Emilee Rauschenberger, Queen Rania Foundation for Education and Development