Investigating Local and National Learning Outcomes in Contexts of Inequality, Conflict, and Emergency

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

This panel will examine the theme of learning outcomes within contexts of violence, conflict, and social exclusion. The panel falls within the theme of Social Justice and Inclusion, addressing the possible routes to educational equality where there are difficult to reach sub-populations that face obstacles in accessing education due to conflict, the trauma of war, and the undermining of education as a common good. The panel builds on previous collections of research that have focussed on the inter-relations between education policy and the challenges imposed by contexts of conflict, fragility and humanitarian crisis (Paulson, 2011). The contribution made by this panel is that it moves beyond the linkages between education and development failures that trigger war and other forms of national strife by digging deeper into educational outcomes with a particular emphasis on learning outcomes. The motivation for this panel is driven by the arguments that political economy analysis (Novelli, 2014) and postcolonial thinking (Hickling Hudson, 2014) are crucial lenses through which to analyse why there continues to a disconnect between international and national development actors and education policy.

There are five papers in this panel that address the challenges for education policy design and measurement in addressing the challenges for communities of teachers, parents, and youth within poor and marginalized communities. Individual papers focus on the impact on learning outcomes of gender inequality, community challenges, teacher trauma, parental perceptions, youth experiences of schooling, and the challenges for designing and measuring learning outcomes. Papers either provide primary data from national contexts in African educational systems and/or provide an evaluation of education metrics to take forward our understanding on how to create more inclusive methods of analysis and measurement. Each paper also provides research tools, such as community action and technology platforms, that can be used to improve the methods that we currently have in place for tracking progress in educational outcomes.

The papers demonstrate the contribution of measures of learning outcomes, at local and national leves. By using evidence from a range of Asian and African countries that face challenges in achieving quality learning outcomes due to either poor levels of democratic practices and/or high levels of violence and conflict the papers show that a deeper understanding of current thinking on gender inequality and teacher trauma can contribute to social justice in education, as can incisive investigation of the role played by humanitarian responses and international agencies in directing types of funding and devising indicators in education.

The intention of this panel is to provide valuable case studies, by examining the impact on learning outcomes of difficult national and local circumstances. By emphasising how institutional contexts and specific shortfalls that adversely impact learning outcomes, the panel hopes to reveal how explicit addressing of ways to activate the agency of communities and individuals can highlight how to generate educational systems that advance social justice. Through the identification of key characteristics that signal educational failures such as food insecurity, falling school attendance, hierarchies of educational access, these papers seek to amplify the urgency of educational reform. This set of papers also emphasises the importance of unpicking current practices in educational policy design and measurement to move towards educational solutions that directly address the alarming and coalescing challenges of educational provision that are the result of pressures within national and local conflict, emergency, and poverty environments.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Shailaja Fennell, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Individual Presentations

• Learning in fear: education systems in times of conflict and famine - Nafisa Waziri

• Learning in emergency settings: The use of technology in Professional Learning Communities to support teachers - Yomna El-Serafy, Open Development and Education; Taskeen Adam, EdTech Hub

• Shrinking Publicness in Education: the conflict between reducing state provision and improving the learning outcomes of youth in poor communities - Shailaja Fennell, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

• Localising SDG4: Context-sensitivity and political influence in the selection of targets and indicators on a national level - Tadashi Hirai, University of Cambridge

Discussant

• Javier Gonzalez, SUMMA