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

Group Submission Type: Highlighted Paper Session

Proposal

The global landscape of education in conflict and emergency (EiE) settings is marked by deep inequities and contestations over whose knowledge, practices, and futures count. Against the backdrop of the CIES 2026 conference theme, this panel interrogates how entrenched divisions are reproduced and, in some cases, resisted within EiE through the lenses of racial justice, play, pandemic-related learning loss, and teacher agency. Bringing together four distinct yet interconnected papers, we ask: How do dominant paradigms of EiE reinforce exclusions, and how might reimagined approaches create space for more equitable, locally grounded, and peaceful futures?

The first paper, “Reckoning with Racial Erasure: Reimagining Social and Emotional Learning in EiE,” argues that in recent years, social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a dominant intervention in EiE, promoted as a universal solution to promote well-being, psychosocial support, and peacebuilding. However, this paper highlights how SEL frameworks and programming have largely failed to grapple with their racialized logics and the ways they erase the lived experiences of crisis-affected learners of color. By framing SEL as race-neutral, EiE actors perpetuate colonial and neocolonial dynamics that obscure structural violence and racial inequities. This paper calls for a racial reckoning within EiE, reimagining SEL not as a universal best practice but as a site to confront systemic inequities and racialized power relations.

The second paper, “Whose Play Counts? Problematizing the Global Diffusion of Play-Based Learning,” observes that in recent years, the concept of play-based learning has gained prominence as a global policy and programming priority, touted as a universal strategy to improve holistic development and learning outcomes for children. Yet this paper demonstrates how international actors have promoted a narrow, Western conception of play that marginalizes local cultural understandings, teacher agency, and community practices. Drawing on ethnographic research in Tanzania, the authors argue that positioning play as universally applicable risks reinforcing hierarchies of knowledge and undermining local epistemologies. The paper calls for reimagining play as a socially, culturally, and politically situated practice that affirms diverse pathways toward learning, belonging, and peace.

The third paper, “Mitigating COVID-19 ‘Learning Loss’ in Crisis Contexts,” interrogates how global education actors responded to the pandemic in ways that reinforced racial and colonial hierarchies. While positioned as a collective crisis requiring urgent action, the COVID-19 response masked “the racist and colonialist logics that imbue the aid/development industry itself.” Drawing on Mills’ concept of Global White Ignorance, the paper analyzes 11 policy guidance documents to show how global actors engaged in three ‘erasures’: whitewashing histories of racism and colonialism, failing to address socio-structural foundations, and shifting responsibility onto local actors. Rather than reckoning with inequities, global organizations perpetuated White supremacy and Western hegemony. The paper concludes by asking what role global actors should play in ensuring a more just and equitable educational future.

The fourth paper, “From Sidelines to Systems: Examining Teacher Development Pathways in Refugee-Hosting Contexts,” examines teachers working in refugee-hosting contexts as critical but often overlooked system actors. Drawing on research in multiple sites, the paper shows how teachers—both refugee and host-community—navigate fragmented professional development opportunities and work across humanitarian, development, and national systems. Despite chronic precarity and marginalization, refugee teachers exercise agency, adapt professional expertise, and support diverse learners in their classrooms. The study demonstrates that investing in teachers as system actors—rather than treating them as temporary or peripheral—can strengthen education systems and contribute to stability, equity, and peacebuilding in crisis-affected societies.

Together, these four papers push the EiE community to critically re-examine how peace is conceptualized, pursued, and practiced in divided worlds. We foreground three central insights:

1. Reckoning with Power and Erasure: EiE interventions such as SEL, play-based learning, and pandemic recovery often universalize Global North frameworks, masking their racialized and cultural underpinnings. Without addressing these dynamics, EiE risks reproducing structural inequities and undermining peace.

2. Affirming Local Agency and Knowledge: Teachers, learners, and communities in refugee-hosting contexts actively reinterpret, resist, and reshape global education agendas. Their agency demonstrates that pathways to peace must be rooted in local epistemologies, practices, and priorities rather than imposed from above.

3. Reimagining Peace through Education: Peace cannot be assumed as an automatic byproduct of education interventions. Instead, peace must be understood as a contested and negotiated process—one that requires racial reckoning, epistemic pluralism, systemic investment in teachers, and locally grounded approaches to inclusion and recovery.

By bringing together critical perspectives on race, play, pandemic learning loss, and teacher development, this panel makes a timely contribution to CIES 2026. We highlight both the limitations of current EiE approaches and the possibilities for transformative alternatives. In so doing, the panel not only critiques but also gestures toward futures where EiE is reimagined as a site of justice, equity, and peacebuilding in deeply divided worlds.

Sub Unit

• Education in Conflict and Emergencies SIG

Chair

• Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Individual Presentations

• Reckoning with Racial Erasure: Reimagining Social and Emotional Learning in the Education in Emergencies Sector - Ritesh Shah, University of Auckland; Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Whose Play Counts? Problematizing the Global Diffusion of Play-Based Learning in the Education in Emergencies Sector - Kelsey A. Dalrymple, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Subilaga M Kejo, Dar Es Salaam Univ College of Education; Bethany Wilinski, Michigan State University

• Mitigating COVID-19 ‘Learning Loss’: Reckoning with the Racial and Colonial Legacies of the Aid/Development Industry - Kayla Boisvert

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

Discussant

• Dana Burde, New York University