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Research-informed policymaking to support effective teacher management in refugee settings: The cases of Ethiopia and Jordan

Mon, April 26, 8:00 to 9:30am PDT (8:00 to 9:30am PDT), Zoom Room, 133

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Teachers are the key to success in any education system. In refugee settings, the role of teachers is particularly significant; teachers can provide crucial continuity and socio-emotional support, and are sometimes the only educational resource available to students. However, despite a concerted effort on the part of the international community to better meet the educational needs of the approximately 13 million of the world’s refugees who are children, significant challenges remain.

First, a serious global teacher shortage means that only 63 percent of primary school-aged refugees and 24 percent of secondary school-aged refugees respectively were able to access education in 2018. Second, the teachers who work in refugee settings, whether they are refugees themselves or members of host communities, face a multitude of challenges that make it difficult to stay motivated and provide quality education. Such challenges include financial and social insecurity, uncertain career opportunities, inadequate compensation, a lack of professional development opportunities, particularly when it comes to providing psychosocial support to students and to practising self-care, language barriers, gender discrimination, and a lack of coordination between the many actors involved in service provision.

Most refugee children will spend their entire childhood in exile. Responding to their educational needs will require innovative research-informed policy solutions that meet these challenges head on and put teachers at the centre, not only because teachers are essential in ensuring that learning continues during crisis, but also because teachers are themselves rights-holders as members of affected communities and potentially powerful agents of policy and practice reform. Such policy solutions need to pay attention to the dynamics and context of the displacement crisis, focusing on teachers in refugee settings rather than teachers of refugees. Not only is the displacement crisis dynamic, with receiving countries becoming sending countries and vice versa, but the threat to global security and wellbeing posed by the current climate crisis will likely lead to new displacement crises in the coming years. Further, sometimes host communities are more vulnerable than refugee communities are, especially if they reside in remote locations, or come from a nomadic population, emphasising the need for a whole-society approach, championed by advocates for the Global Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) and Global Compact for Refugees (GCR).

As more and more emergencies become protracted crises, and refugee populations continue to grow, it is even more urgent to build an evidence base to guide the development and implementation of such innovative policy solutions. The purpose of this panel is to present two case studies – Ethiopia and Jordan – from a multi-country study investigating how to attract, recruit, develop, motivate, and retain a workforce of excellent teachers who facilitate quality education for refugees and host communities alike. The two key aims of the research initiative are to build an understanding of who is teaching at the primary-level in refugee settings in different countries and how they are managed, and to work with governments and partners to develop research-informed policy guidance on effective teacher management in these settings. The overarching research question for the project is:

“What promising policies and practices exist for the management of primary-level teachers in refugee settings, and where are there potential areas for further policy development and implementation?”

We have taken a collaborative, iterative, multi-phased, mixed methods approach to our research design in order to explore how teacher management policies are being developed, communicated, interpreted, mediated, struggled over, and implemented at national, regional, and local levels in a number of different countries. Such a design involves engaging governments and other key partners throughout the research process, from conceptualisation, through to data collection, through to analysis, through to additional data collection, through to final analysis, through to write up and report finalisation. Following the finalisation of findings, we work together with key national stakeholders to develop practical, relevant policy guidance, drawing from enabling and constraining factors as identified in our research and building on key national policy developments relevant to teacher management in refugee settings.

Through this panel, we will reflect on two of the key questions from the conference call for papers, namely: “How might we interrogate all of our roles, our relationships and our processes as we engage as individual entities and collaboratively?” and “Who benefits from the work we do, and how?” We challenge conference participants to ‘think aloud’ with us about how to undertake more collaborative, more iterative research that encourages reciprocal meaningful continuous learning between researchers, governments, and other partners, and, importantly, leads to effective policy action.

In our first paper, we will examine the management of national and refugee teachers in refugee camp schools and schools in host communities in Ethiopia, presenting key findings from our Ethiopian case study, launched in September 2018 and finalised in June 2020. In our second paper, we will share how we developed our research-informed policy guidance on effective teacher management in refugee settings for this case study based on our key findings and in collaboration with representatives from the Ethiopian Ministry of Education (MoE), the Agency of Refugee & Returnee Affairs (ARRA), and other partner organisations. Our third paper explores the management of elementary-level teachers in refugee settings in Jordan, namely in public schools hosting Syrian refugee schools and in schools for Palestinian refugees run by the United Nations Relief & Works Agency (UNRWA), showcasing findings from our Jordanian case study, which was conducted between September 2019 and February 2021. Finally, in our fourth paper, we will discuss how we worked with the Jordanian MoE, UNRWA, and other partners to develop policy guidance building on our research findings and key policy developments in the country and the UNRWA system.

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