Lebanon’s (ongoing) social and emotional (SEL) journey into its education sector: Holistically beating the odds!

• In Event: Policy and Politics of Education

Proposal

Contextual background:

Lebanon has been on the global scene in the last decade, with its state of chronic crises. On Lebanon’s menu of dynamic, inveterate, and nonlinear-occurring crises, there is a complete mixture and disconnect of lingering remnants of post-Civil War, intermittent (yet significant) scares to national security, a decade-long Syrian refugee crisis, and the Beirut Blast of August 2020 - one of the most powerful artificial non-nuclear explosion in history that was felt in neighboring countries; these are followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the complete political deadlock, and the bottomless pit of a deteriorating financial crisis.

Given Lebanon’s unique position as a prolonged crisis-affected country, this paper considers: 1) social and emotional learning (SEL) as an important element for healthy child development, thus positioning SEL as a foundational component within the educational context; and 2) including SEL as part of the Ministry of Education and Higher Education’s strategic planning within complex and dynamic relations among local and transnational actors in coexistence with the crises.

Considering these two elements, Lebanon’s donor-funded nationwide education project aims to improve children’s SEL skills, as one of its three major objectives. The initiative has created a positive momentum for the Ministry to engage in, and commit to, an improved learning experience for all children in Lebanon. Importantly, it also helps the Ministry reinterpret and recontextualize SEL within its specific historical, cultural, economic, and political context.

This presentation takes us through the turbulent, yet tenacious, SEL journey that the project has taken in close collaboration with Lebanon’s Ministry of Education and the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD), the academic ‘brain’/entity of the Ministry. This journey continues to challenge a deeply enrooted status quo of a typically traditional teaching and learning approach within a reactionary education sector to provide improved learning experience for all children through the integration of SEL.

A National SEL Framework as a ground-up start of the SEL journey:

Despite all odds, the driving force behind the initial and official phase of the SEL journey was embedded within the Ministry and CERD’s vision to collaboratively work toward a long-term sustainable plan to have SEL be part of every learner’s early learning experience.

The first phase, a crisis response spearheaded by Ministry and CERD, was to develop a set of measurement tools to assess children’s SEL skills. Without any basis or framework as to the contextually relevant skills to assess, this proved challenging to the Ministry; as a result, the Ministry and CERD decided to take a ground-up approach to develop a contextualized national SEL framework.

The donor-funded, nationwide project facilitated this process with local and international academic partners. Through a long-term, three-year collaborative commitment, the Ministry and CERD led the development of Lebanon’s national SEL framework with the project team, contextualizing and unifying an understanding of SEL within the Lebanese context, followed by its recent (2023) official launch. The National SEL framework is considered a major steppingstone to bringing forward more coherence, alignment, relevance and accountability to the Ministry’s many related, potentially well-intentioned, but disconnected efforts.

One of the by-products of the SEL framework is the ongoing process of piloting the framework constructs to fulfil the initial need of having SEL measures; only this time, working on developing contextually relevant SEL measures.

National SEL framework as a critical entry point toward sustainability through institutional capacity strengthening:

As a result of the national SEL framework and under the national curriculum development, CERD considered SEL a central and transversal pillar of the curriculum reform process as well as curriculum content. Their rationale was, “while SEL sets the foundation of the whole child, pairing the SEL skills with academics helps build a foundation that supports students' personal and academic success” . CERD specifically requested capacity strengthening support for their academic as well as training unit specialists on the theoretical and conceptual foundations of SEL for effective integration in the subject matter during the development of curriculum and teaching and learning resources.

Accordingly, the project team designed a course that was delivered to 32 CERD specialists in a series of monthly workshops. Qualitative data from reflection questionnaires showed that 81% of participants reported that they have a comprehensive understanding of SEL, and importantly, the skills for the technical and practical implementation of SEL into curriculum. Participants commented: “a transformational experience”, “…understanding that SEL should be a natural part of every teacher’s teaching practices and every child’s learning experiences”, “how has this not been part of our pedagogical practices.”

The road to SEL policymaking:

While Lebanon’s economic crisis has the government preoccupied with more pressing matters, the positive outcomes of the social and emotional work in Lebanon has resulted in initial engagement in and discussions about policy making in SEL with both Ministry and CERD, and its positioning within the education sector, while at the same time complimenting other existing policies in the educational and mental health sectors. Policy making for SEL will consolidate all nationwide efforts and has the potential to improve accountability and transparency and provide legitimacy and credibility to the Ministry for its citizens and other stakeholders. Within the global context, Lebanon is accountable for its commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals, more specifically, Goal 4.2.

This presentation will discuss project journey takeaways showing that: 1) It is of critical import that the comprador group of intermediaries (local NGOs, INGOs) especially within a crisis context play a balanced, continuous, transparent, consistent and proactive role to ensure local actor focus and long-term vision for an improved system that would default into an improved education sector for the well-being of children; and 2) the long-term presence of transnational actors has i) potentially maintained continuity for the Ministry, allowing learned lessons to inform more meaningfully into follow up phases, but importantly, ii) the role of the intermediary organization between both the local and international actors has been substantial in realizing the efforts in the national education system.

Authors

• Garene Kaloustian, World Learning

• Rania Ghssoub, Ministry of Education and Higher Education of Lebanon