Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals: A Review of Literature on Teachers in Conflict-affected Contexts

• In Event: Education across the globe: Facing conflicts and challenges

Proposal

In a statement ahead of the Transforming Education Summit in September 2022, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed urged nations to look deeper into the “learning crisis disaster” and transform unjust education systems (United Nations, 2022). She asserted that “when the most disadvantaged are denied access to quality education, this widens inequalities, reducing social cohesion and increasing tensions” (para. 13). Mohammed’s statement reminds us of education’s “negative face” – that it is not always a force for good (Saltarelli & Bush, 2000). Therefore, social cohesion and peacebuilding work are fundamental to education systems in conflict-affected contexts.

Transformative work also directly relates to the expectations of teachers worldwide to nurture children into productive, creative, civic-minded citizens. However, teachers take on much more in conflict-affected contexts, nation-states, and occupied territories impacted by an insurgency, protracted conflict, war, or hosting displaced people in transit or living in refugee settlements. As state representatives, teachers are often targeted to frighten and control the public. The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (GCPEA) reported that since 2010, deliberate attacks on education have risen exponentially in developing nations, with more than 11,000 documented incidents in at least 92 countries between 2015 and 2019; in 2020, the attacks increased by one-third and remained the same in 2021; and the occupation of vacant schools by armed forces and militants rose during the pandemic (Marston et al., 2022; Tsolakis et al., 2020). Attacks on education can take various forms – the military occupation of schools, the abduction of children attending school, the murder or kidnapping of teachers and school administrators, the destruction of educational facilities, and more (Tsolakis et al., 2020).

Consequently, teachers are at the frontline of protecting children from physical harm at school (Winthrop & Matsui, 2013). They take care of the psychosocial needs of children who likely experienced severe forms of trauma. These include physical and sexual violence, witness to conflict, or the death of family members, to name a few. Add to this the onerous expectations on teachers, as literate community members, to be the primary liaison between parents, the community, and emergency services offered by international aid agencies. In other words, teachers working in conflict-affected contexts are expected to be high-quality educators, mental health workers, peacebuilders, civic standards promoters, and catalysts of political change (van Ommering, 2017), all the while facing threats to their own physical and mental well-being.

This article is a systematic literature review of research on teachers working in conflict-affected contexts in the past decade. The 70 English-language studies, published since 2010, were conducted in 23 nation-states, one occupied territory, and one semi-autonomous province. The review applies what Newman and Gough (2020) classify as a “broadly configurative synthesis logic” (p. 4). In other words, I use exploratory and iterative methods to create a fuller conceptual understanding of the phenomenon.

The iterative process resulted in three levels of analysis. First, I categorized each study based on the overarching research problem, which yielded four significant research programs. I labeled the research programs 1) teachers’ politics of education, 2) teachers’ pedagogical practice, 3) teachers’ well-being and 4) technology-based education. The contextual nature of teachers’ work meant that I looked for patterns and higher-level observations in each research program that transcended context specificity instead of seeking to generalize “findings.”

Second, questions on the role of education in fostering peace and reconciliation in conflict-affected societies led me to critically review a subset of the literature through the theoretical lens of Aronowitz and Giroux’s (1993) thoughtful intellectuals. Building on the critical theories of Paolo Freire and Antonio Gramsci, Aronowitz and Giroux posit that education in modern society is a vehicle to combat power relations to transform society collectively. They argue that “educators at all levels of schooling have to be seen as intellectuals, who as mediators, legitimators, and producers of ideas and social practices, perform a pedagogical function that is eminently political in nature” (p. 31). They also contend that teachers who are transformative intellectuals use their agency to engage students in the struggle for justice. This framework allowed me to elucidate essential factors that impact teachers’ agency to promote social change toward peace in conflict-affected contexts.

Lastly, in response to the call to “decolonize” education in emergencies praxis (Brooks, 2020), I reviewed the literature on teachers in conflict from a decolonial lens. The colonial matrix of power, or simply coloniality, constitutes the colonial and imperial differences that are entangled with the rise of capitalism and the racialized social classifications in all aspects of life – political, economic, cultural, sexual, epistemological, knowledge production, and imaginative (Quijano, 2007). In global higher education – the center of knowledge production today – coloniality manifests in the “who, when, why, and where knowledge is produced” (Mignolo, 2011, as cited in Shahjahan et al., 2022, p. 76). For this review, I examined trends across crucial characteristics of the researcher, including the research question, methodology, theoretical framework, and the author's institutional affiliation, to reveal how the studies perpetuated or disrupted coloniality in knowledge production.

Reading across this growing body of scholarship, the review illustrates the complex and contradictory relationship between teachers’ beliefs, lives, and work during armed conflict and forced displacement. Through it, I argue that teachers’ agency to advance social cohesion and peacebuilding is contingent on how they negotiate their ethical and professional responsibilities, their beliefs and sociopolitical identities, and the level of violence directed at them by the warring parties. Furthermore, I suggest that while emerging research on teachers in conflict-affected contexts is hopeful and necessary, the current trend further institutionalizes the coloniality of power in international higher education. Advancing the fields of Education and Conflict, Refugee Education, and Education in Emergencies, this review informs teacher education, support, and supervision initiatives by national Ministries of Education and their international partners. It also offers insights on decolonizing education research in the humanitarian sector.

Author

• Kiruba Murugaiah, Boston College