BackHome
Refresh: OffView Personal Schedule
Session Submission Summary

Teaching for Equity: Evidence on approaches targeting children furthest left behind

Wed, February 22, 3:15 to 4:45pm EST (3:15 to 4:45pm EST), Grand Hyatt Washington, Floor: Independence Level (5B), Independence D

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Equity is at the heart of Sustainable Development Goal 4 which seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all, and the Incheon Declaration of the 2015 World Education Forum, which calls inclusion and equity as the cornerstone of a transformative education agenda. Broad-based expansion of opportunity in education, with particular emphasis on those that are facing disadvantages due to their socioeconomic background, disability, ethnic identity, gender, effects of displacement, or other characteristics and forms of adversity, becomes an important element of understanding success in educational development – indeed, of success in development at large. A transformative education agenda seeks to build equity in and through education, both changing experiences in the classroom and improving the potential of schooling to shift life trajectories for those facing adversity.

In an ideal world, life outcomes are determined solely by personal choices and motivations and are independent of one’s background and social and economic constraints. It is known that education systems are far from this ideal, and they often fail to reverse the effects of broader social, demographic, and economic barriers affecting learners; in fact, they often reinforce them. Thus, an equity-oriented analysis in education seeks to uncover the systematic relationships between key outcomes, on the one hand, and the demographic and social characteristics of subgroups that may predict disparities over and above individual choice and motivation, on the other.

In addressing the root causes and the institutional drivers to inequity, solutions may differ, and the scope and scale of the impact that an individual organisation can make may vary dramatically across programs and geographic contexts. Individual organisations with a commitment to equity can magnify their imprint on the field through a coordinated, deliberate approach across a community of funders to address a set of known challenges and reduce the prominence of known equity dimensions, such as gender, poverty, ethnicity, disability, and displacement in key outcomes. Such an approach would include agreement on key outcomes and indicators of school participation and learning, sharing knowledge and evidence on the drivers of inequality, and a consistent process for using a set of core equity dimensions in identifying disparities and measuring progress against them. This would require a commitment to generating consistent data and evidence on equity in education, allowing a broader and ever-increasing circle of education stakeholders to witness the diminishing effect of gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and poverty on the way children and youth attend school, engage in the learning process, and move on to productive adulthood. Coordination and consistency in applying an equity lens towards identifying gaps, developing funding strategies, and tracking progress in outcomes achieves the important objective of institutionalizing equity within the education system.

As education practitioners and stakeholders in the realization of these goals, it is the responsibility of every funding, implementing and research organization in education internationally to be asking questions about our own contributions to building equity. While a great amount of data gets produced in the course of education development projects, only a fraction provides the depth that is needed to assess intervention impact on the different equity dimensions. At the technical and implementation level, organizations need to capture and use the necessary evidence to understand and respond to inequity in education provision and outcomes. This panel is a combination of five great evidence-based abstracts that share Evidence on collaborative approaches targeting children furthest left behind and how this is translating into enhancing Equity. Alive to the fact that teachers are central to the experience in the classroom – this group panel explores strategies for enhancing the learning experience by ideating ways of improving the instruction methods used by teachers to reach learners of different abilities while making learning interesting and holistic.

Objective of the group Panel

The objective of the panel is to share Evidence on approaches targeting children furthest left behind that contribute to best practices on teaching for equity.

Structure of the group panel:

The first paper will unpack how supporting teachers with alternative pedagogies can help to address the challenge of providing foundational numeracy and literacy to learners left behind in classes due to a variety of reasons. The second paper will explore what worked for children left behind for enhancing effective learning during COVID 19 school closure looking at foundational literacy, level-based learning and the role of parents. The third paper examines the support provided to teachers during school reopening and recovery in the informal sector. The fourth paper speaks to the efforts of the key stakeholders to improving learning outcomes for marginalized children in the informal settlements.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant