Prioritizing Teachers in Fragile and Crisis Contexts: Contextually-Grounded Approaches to Understanding Teacher Well-being in a Digital Age - Part 2

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Teachers stand on the front lines of realizing the ambitious and critical goal of providing an education necessary to promote a sustainable, peaceful, and prosperous future for all children and youth (Jennings, 2016; Rice, 2003; Snilstveit et al., 2016). As education systems shift to demanding not only enrollment outcomes but holistic learning outcomes—academic, social-emotional, health, and cultural skills—teachers are held accountable and asked to be masters-of-all trades (Pritchett, 2015). This is particularly true in fragile and crisis contexts, where weakened education systems, combined with political, social, and/or economic instability and forced migration, require that teachers don myriad hats in working with their students, and within their schools and communities (Dryden-Peterson, 2011; Shriberg, 2007). Complex, compounded crises increase the demands placed on teachers, who are tasked with providing quality education and supporting students’ well-being, often with minimal or no professional development support, while coping with the effects of the crises in their own lives (Mendenhall, Gomez, & Varni, 2019).
Teachers must navigate such demands while facing numerous risks at multiple ecological levels, including but not limited to: 1) the teacher level, including inadequate and/or inconsistent pay and stressful disruptions in their own family and social networks; 2) the school level, including large class sizes and limited school leadership and support; and 3) the community level, including societal norms that devalue the role of teachers (Tumwebaze & MacLachlan, 2012; Spreen & Knapczyk, 2017). In low-resource, crisis, and conflict-affected settings, few, if any, supports are available to help teachers build the complex skill sets needed to effectively address these barriers and the multi-faceted demands they encounter with their students and in their professional lives (Hardman et al., 2011; Burns & Lawrie, 2015). The available support traditionally treats teachers like production functions, the input being in-service training focused on specific curricula and the output being gains in student learning, with little attention paid to helping teachers navigate the roles, expectations, and stressors they must balance at the nexus of students’ lives and systems’ accountability (Schwartz, Cappella, & Aber, 2019).
The human and economic costs of deprioritizing support for teachers, particularly their well-being, and the systemic conditions that constrain and enable such support are clear in stable contexts; the literature and empirical evidence on teacher well-being from the United States and Europe show that teaching is among one of the most stressful occupations (Greenberg, Brown, & Abenavoli, 2016). Evidence also indicates that teachers are the strongest school-level variable associated with student learning and has identified a significant relationship between teachers’ well-being and students’ social, emotional, and cognitive development (see e.g. Schwille, Dembélé, & Schubert, 2007; Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; McCallum et al., 2017). Yet, despite the recognition that teachers are key actors in their student’s learning and that teaching is one of the most stressful professions, there are few education policies and programs that provide clear guidance on how to support teacher well-being.
Though it has become more common for national education sector plans and humanitarian response plans to reference teacher well-being, there is still a gap in translating support for teacher well-being into practice. Addressing this gap requires better understanding teacher well-being through developing measurement tools that are reliable, valid, comparable, feasible, and contextually relevant. Several measurement tools with strong psychometric properties have been developed and validated in Western contexts to capture various dimensions of well-being, but we do not know if they are adequate for collecting information about teachers’ well-being in low-income and crisis-affected countries. Oftentimes researchers and practitioners use measurement tools validated in developed countries with little or no contextualization, raising questions on whether the content of the tool still captures the construct in the new setting. Few studies focus on adapting and examining the psychometric properties of well-being measurement tools with teacher samples in low-income and crisis-affected countries (Aboagye et al., 2018; Soares et al., 2021).
Addressing issues and priorities outlined above, this two-part panel aims to respond to this gap and deepen our understanding of teacher well-being in low-resource, fragile, and crisis contexts to comprehend better how teachers make meaning of their well-being, how different factors around teachers influence their well-being, and how to better measure, and ultimately, support well-being in a manner that respects the agency of teachers in the process. Spanning Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America & the Caribbean, the second part of this two-part panel examines how to develop, design, and implement contextually relevant, validated teacher well-being measures. The first paper explores the validation of context-specific teacher well-being assessments in Honduras, Haiti, and Liberia, utilizing anchoring vignettes to account for differences in perceptions of well-being. By highlighting country-specific constructs and applying a common scale measuring teacher satisfaction, stress, and burnout, the study offers insights into cross-country comparisons and the implications for future research in low-resource, fragile contexts. The second paper presents the validation of a teacher well-being instrument developed in Colombia through a bottom-up process that incorporated elementary school teachers’ input. The findings present the instrument’s reliability and factorial structure, of four constructs: teachers’ subjective well-being, school climate, working conditions, and socioemotional skills. The last paper presents findings from a global evidence review on teacher well-being in conflict and protracted crisis settings as well as from mixed-methods research with refugee and host community teachers in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda. By synthesizing the global evidence before empirically exploring teacher well-being in four contexts affected by forced displacement, this study deepens our understanding of the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that enhance or impede teacher well-being and has implications for how to improve support for teachers in these settings.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame

Individual Presentations

• Using anchoring vignettes to measure teacher well-being in Honduras, Haiti, and Liberia: Developing context-specific measures of well-being - Mariana Arboleda, Universidad del Norte, Colombia; Nikhit D'Sa, University of Notre Dame

• Developing a context-specific instrument for teacher well-being in Colombia - Ana M. Velasquez, Universidad de los Andes; Enrique Chaux, Universidad de los Andes

• Better understanding and improving support for teacher well-being in contexts of forced displacement - Danielle Lorber Falk, International Rescue Committee (IRC); Silvia Diazgranados, International Rescue Committee

Discussant

• Mary Mendenhall, Teachers College, Columbia University