Engaging with school communities in MENA during crisis

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

Over the past decade, political and economic changes throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have introduced shocks to public systems. For public education in the region, shocks have ranged from the influx of refugee students from Syria to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, teacher strikes, and armed conflict, among many other consequential events. The multitude of shocks have created a variety of challenges for Ministries of Education, school directors, teachers, students, and parents. In Yemen, the ongoing conflicts and general insecurity mean there are high populations of internally displaced persons, about one third of which are children. Additionally, schools have been damaged during the conflicts and the Ministry of Education is facing financial challenges which limit their ability to meet the basic educational needs of Yemeni students. As a result, millions of Yemeni children are out-of-school, and more are at risk of leaving the system. In Lebanon, the economic collapse and insufficient response from the government led to months of widespread protests, which shut down public schools for several weeks starting in October 2019 and continued to disrupt teaching and learning through February 2020, when the pandemic forced months-long closures of schools. Since public schools reopened for in-person instruction in October 2021, public school teachers in Lebanon have continued to protest and demand improved working conditions. Chief among grievances is the diminished purchasing power of teachers’ salaries with rising inflation. Teacher protests, in the form of strikes and rallies, have also focused attention on low resource levels in public schools, the lack of training and professional development opportunities for public school teachers and the inability of the current public education systems to meet the learning needs of Lebanese students.
While Ministries of Education in the MENA region, with the support of development partners, have often responded to these challenges by investing in programs that target student and teacher well-being along with students’ academic performance, increasingly innovative approaches to designing models are proposed and implemented in the region to address the diverse educational challenges based on student, parent, and teacher input. Development partners, such as USAID, are now seeking direct beneficiary input for the design of interventions, to build in sustainable approaches, and promote active community engagement. Development partners also seek direct beneficiary feedback to gauge the effectiveness of the interventions and ensure that they remain responsive to challenges and needs of school communities as expressed during teachers’ protests.
The presentations in this panel will focus on applied research in the MENA region which explore the challenges facing governments and development partners’ responses to shocks to public education systems and efforts to decolonize data and incorporate local school communities into program design. This panel will come together to consider what could be missing and what could be added to strengthen school communities in countries where public school systems are facing immense challenges and school communities are demanding, through different forms of protests, improved conditions that support teaching and learning. This panel will also explore research methodologies that enable close collaboration with local school communities and center beneficiary voices.
The first presentation will focus on the use of participatory research approaches in Yemen to incorporate student, parent and community input to design future nonformal education approaches and to support education services for students with disabilities. The second presentation will focus on research conducted in Lebanon, which starts by exploring the impact of the 2019 protests on teacher practices, teacher well-being, and their ability to continue to work in the public system. The presentation will explore teachers’ abilities to continue their work amid upheaval while sharing how the team incorporated local researchers to provide space for meaningful research in crisis settings. The final presentation will focus on a participatory study about tolerance education in Lebanon, highlighting how the relevance of the topic along with the participation of students, parents, teachers, and school directors informed both the methodology and the recommendations for future programming. The presentation will describe how the study brought together students, parents, teachers, and school directors from diverse regional backgrounds to define the concept of tolerance education and provide insight into how a tolerance education program could foster greater cross-community interactions.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Gaelle Simon, Management Systems International

Individual Presentations

• Incorporating beneficiary input in the design of education services during protracted conflicts - Lisa Slifer-Mbacke, MSI Worldwide

• Understanding teacher practices in times of government divestments and social upheaval - Rouba Reaidi, Management Systems International

• Engaging school communities in Lebanon to explore the possibilities of tolerance education - Michelle L Solorio, Management Systems International (Tetra Tech)