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Decolonizing international development through collaborative research-practice partnerships: 10 years of evidence and opportunities from Lebanon

Mon, March 11, 8:00 to 9:30am, Hyatt Regency Miami, Floor: Terrace Level, Orchid A

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Historically, international development projects are short-lived (averaging 6-7 implementation years), and conceptualized in institutions in the global North (Youker, 2019). In quickly intervening to set up new structures, we may miss implementing key systemic changes - including shifting norms, resources, regulatory processes, and operations - that support sustainable education reform (Foster-Fishman, Nowell, & Yang, 2007). In parallel, research that accompanies these projects, originates in Global North institutions and is transferred with some contextualization efforts. As large international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) strive towards a less colonial approach to conducting international development projects, what are possible examples of better approaches to implementing these projects and measuring their impacts?

Quality Instruction Towards Access and Basic Education Improvement (QITABI) has been serving Lebanese public primary schools for the past 10 years. When QITABI was first awarded in 2014, its main goals included: 1) improving reading outcomes; 2) expanding access and improving school environments; and 3) strengthening management resilience in the education system. As a part of this effort, QITABI has developed and provided multi-component comprehensive Arabic literacy teacher support programming, which included 1) the development of a new early-grade Arabic literacy curriculum and resources based on the Balanced Literacy Approach (EGR-BLA), 2) sequenced and sustained teacher training, and 3) bi-weekly coaching school visits for Arabic teachers. These services were first provided exclusively to a randomly selected 260 schools for the first 3-4 years of implementation in 2015-2019. While some of these program components were scaled up and provided to all public schools in Lebanon (e.g., literacy resources, teacher training), intensive coaching was offered only to a subgroup (N=120) of the initially targeted schools. By the end of this intensive program (academic year 2019-20), the QITABI consortium reported improvement in both teacher instructional practice and student literacy skills in the targeted 260 schools (World Learning, 2020).

Due to the success of the project, QITABI-2 was expanded in 2019 to serve all primary public schools with the goals of: 1) improved student performance in reading; writing and mathematics; 2) improving social-emotional learning; and 3) improving national-level service delivery of education. This scaling meant that the original randomly selected 260 schools continued to receive services through QITABI-2 while the other schools received services for less years.

What is the impact of such long-term, consistent service to Lebanese public schools? To find out, the lead of the QITABI Consortium contracted a team of Egyptian, Syrian, Korean, and American researchers to serve as a research resource partner. In this role, the researchers utilized their knowledge and in-house expertise to understand the Consortium’s research needs; find and build tools to meet those needs; and create reflective spaces to co-design the research, co-develop research tools, co-analyze findings and co-interpret results. In doing so, we envisioned and attained a model that decenters the voices of institutions from the global North. We present research that is collaborative, meaningful to practitioners, and utilizes their lived experience from implementing the project to design research that captures such experience.

This panel has two objectives: first, to provide evidence that investing in long-term education reform projects is necessary for sustainable and lasting change. Our second objective is to showcase the process of what we believe is a deeply collaborative research-practice partnership (RPP).

The first presentation will share the process of hypothesizing a conceptual model of school volatility and exploring whether it predicts school, teacher and student outcomes. The second presentation will explain the QITABI model and goals followed by sharing stakeholders’ perspectives regarding implementation and impact. The third presentation will focus on the process of developing a measure for principal’s involvement in QITABI implementation and his/her opinions about QITABI. Finally, our last presentation will share results from a quasi-experimental study attempting to assess the impact of QITABI on the 260 schools that have been the longest-served schools by the project.

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