Teacher-led professional development: Collective acts of protest in displacement and crisis contexts?

• In Event: Teacher agency, autonomy, and leadership as essential ingredients for effective professional development

Proposal

Teachers working in displacement, refugee, and crisis settings (DRCS) around the world have limited access to quality, holistic, ongoing professional development (PD) (Adelman, 2018; Mendenhall, et al., 2018; Duale, et al., 2019; Abu-Amsha, 2022; Henderson, 2022; Kennedy & Laurillard, 2019). They have even less access to locally-specific or contextualized PD created and facilitated by teachers for teachers despite evidence that this type of PD positively impacts teacher practice (Acosta, et al., 2021; Campbell, et al., 2022; Darling-Hammond, et al., 2017; INEE, 2019). Limited or poor quality PD, lack of a support network, and overall poor work conditions are among the critical factors that affect teacher retention and impact in refugee and emergency contexts (Karkouti et al., 2021; Ndijuye, 2023; Ring & West, 2015; UNHCR, 2016/2022). Teachers are key to student outcomes, both in terms of academic progress and holistic well-being (Burroughs, et al., 2019; Fauth, et al., 2019; Sharifian, et al., 2019, Schwille et al., 2007), especially in DRCS where opportunities and resources are severely limited. Yet, investment in teacher learning and well-being remains limited (GEM, 2015; GPE, 2021; UNHCR, 2022; World Bank, n.d.).


In Lebanon, where crisis has followed crisis in recent years (World Bank, 2022), teachers are demoralized and, in some cases, demotivated. An on-going economic crisis, compounded by constant interruptions to the academic year, has been a cause of demotivation among teachers and administrators in Lebanon. (Hdaife, 2023; Khurma, 2023). Teachers of refugee and displacement backgrounds living in Lebanon, and, also, Lebanese teachers working with displaced and refugee learners across Lebanon, need more PD to meet refugee and vulnerable learners’ needs (Bradley et al., 2020; Adelman et al., 2019; Greaves et al., 2019).


This paper presentation will outline a PD intervention wherein teachers, working with an international non-profit organization, co-created PD open education resources (OERs) and, then, used those resources independently within their local communities to provide PD workshops by teachers for teachers. This radical act of agentic, collective teacher leadership has yielded positive results and provokes thinking about the many forms protest might take. When teachers are not receiving the support they need, what resources do they, themselves, have to address that gap? Particularly within lower-resourced, crisis, and displacement settings, is the act of a collective of teachers sharing resources and knowledge while engaging in critical and constructive dialogue outside of “sanctioned” ministry, university, or other formal channels of PD an act of protest?

Drawing on frameworks of participatory design and collective action, including those of Bang and Vossoughi (2016), Escobar (2017), Freire (1970), and Woolis (2017), among others, the authors ponder and invite discussion around the nature of teacher-led PD and the avenues for protest and systems change within both the Lebanese national education system and the global education in DRCS ecosystem.

As early iterations of the project have demonstrated, learning with colleagues in supportive communities of practice can cultivate belonging and well-being. As one Senior Project Fellow in Lebanon noted after facilitating a workshop for her peers in spring 2023, teachers themselves are requesting PD that attends to their well-being. Two teachers in her workshop shared: “we think we ourselves need support and few skills to help us manage our better well being, as teachers pass through lots of hardships.” Teachers in this Fellow’s workshop integrated what they learned during the PD into their classrooms and reflected on its impact on their own well-being. As this intervention has demonstrated, teachers becoming aware of their own needs, in order to meet the needs of their students, is critical. Research supports the role of social-emotional learning and psychosocial support in DRCS (Ager et al., 2011, Fleming et al., 2021, Greaves et al., 2019, Jordans et al., 2016) and, also, the strong relationship between teacher well-being and student cognitive, social, and emotional development (Jennings, 2016). Education policies and PD programs rarely, however, address teacher well-being directly (Falk et al., 2019; Karkouti et al., 2021). Could teacher-led PD offer not only pathways to well-being but pathways for increased collective action, including protest, because of that well-being?

The authors will share the ways that teachers, as agents of change, have become more confident and prepared to take actions to fit the needs of their contexts rather than step aside and wait for “solutions” from above or from outside. Teachers' roles have begun shifting from implementers of received content and passive recipients of PD to engaged learners, facilitators, curriculum developers, and agents of change. When teachers co-create, lead, and facilitate PD, they become aware of their needs and, also, how to help each other meet those needs even in the most difficult of circumstances. Teachers who take part in peer-led PD report being more motivated because the teachers who are giving the sessions understand the context and what is happening on the ground better than specialists who have been away from the classroom or who have never even spent time in classrooms like theirs.

This session will include a brief overview of the project that has provoked the authors’ thinking around teacher-led PD as act of protest and collective action, situating that within critical posthuman and feminist theorizations of becoming-with and intra-activity (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 2016; Murris, 2021/2022) while constructively exploring questions of agency, participatory design, collective action, and protest in education in DRCS.

The authors argue that equipping and empowering teachers in Lebanon, among other DRCS, to lead for change in their communities is an important, often missing, piece of the transformative and reimagining conversation globally. Might teacher-led PD be a key to unlocking the potential for collective action among teachers? Might it be a form of protest against the continued marginalization of teachers, particularly those working in contexts made vulnerable by global political-economic policy and socio-political inequities? How might relational, holistic, and collective approaches to PD that center, equip, and empower teachers to lead make a difference in Lebanon and other DRCS?

Authors

• Sara Kassab, American University of Beirut

• Julie Kasper, University of Arizona / Childhood Education International