From Sidelines to Systems: Examining Teacher Development for Play-Based Learning in East African Refugee Settings

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Contesting Dominant Paradigms: Race, Play, Pandemic, and Teachers in Education in Emergencies

Proposal

Teachers working in refugee-hosting contexts are tasked with myriad responsibilities, including managing overcrowded classrooms with multi-age and multilingual learners who may be experiencing psychosocial distress, food shortages, and ongoing insecurity. Teachers in these settings may hail from the host/local or refugee community and may or may not hold formal teaching qualifications or earn livable wages. Despite these mixed teacher profiles and constant challenges inside and outside of the classroom, teachers in refugee-hosting contexts are also expected to implement the latest education innovations, many of which derive from external agendas and are diffused by international actors via top-down hierarchies of implementation. Some examples include: education technologies (Edtech), gender transformative pedagogies, inclusive education, play-based learning, and social-emotional learning, to name a few. The introduction and roll out of some of these innovations may entail short-term, stand-alone, and culturally unresponsive teacher training workshops. What happens when teachers who participated in these workshops return to their schools, and the larger systems in which they are embedded, and try to implement what they learned? Taking play-based learning as a proxy for other externally-introduced innovations, this paper examines the implications of sidestepping the national education system through comparative case studies in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Uganda.

Drawing on interview findings from 37 humanitarian and education sector practitioners working in East Africa and globally, coupled with current evidence about play-based learning and teacher professional development (TPD) in low- and middle-income contexts, we examine the challenges and opportunities of taking a systems approach to TPD in humanitarian and refugee-hosting settings. Innovative approaches “cannot be understood by looking only at one institution, program, or policy,” but rather they must be examined in a way that discerns “how diverse elements relate to and impact one another” (Kagan, 2016, p. 3). Furthermore, education interventions often fail due to their incoherence with other elements in the system (Spivak, 2021). We argue that creating meaningful, relevant and ongoing TPD opportunities in both stable and crisis contexts in East Africa (and beyond) will entail meaningful coordination and collaboration with myriad national, humanitarian, and development actors including school leaders, communities, parents, teacher training colleges, teacher trainers and assessors, sub-national and national-level officials and bureaucrats.

In taking an expansive view of the “system”, we ultimately propose a conceptual framework for strengthening teacher professional development that embodies both the top-down and bottom-up system approaches that are needed to adequately support teachers and adapt approaches to local contexts, whether for play-based learning or other innovations. We further recognize and position teachers as the important actors they are in supporting their learners and ameliorating the harms they face in contexts of conflict and displacement.

Authors

• Mary Mendenhall, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Jihae Cha, The George Washington University

• Danielle Lorber Falk, International Rescue Committee (IRC)

• Christopher Henderson, NORRAG, Geneva Graduate Institute

• Vrinda Chopra