Blog

Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) has published the INEE Guidance Note on Gender. This document builds on the INEE Pocket Guide to Gender which was published almost 10 years ago. It shares current best practices and experience relating to gender and education in conflict and crisis, from a range of partners. The Guidance Note is available in English, and will soon be available in Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

‘The case for inclusive education’ is an article by Dragana Sretenov (Open Society Foundations) and Nafisa Baboo (Light for the World), published in Early Childhood Matters 2019. The article highlights that their organisations are launching a new report, ‘Leaving No One Behind When Learning Starts’ which will draw attention to the current low levels of investment in inclusive and equitable early childhood development.

We will be filming in two countries. The first confirmed country is Ukraine. We filmed there for our previous training video package (‘An Inclusive Day‘), and last year we worked with Ukrainian young people to carry out action research with kindergarten children. We are therefore delighted that we will be returning to Ukraine to document more experiences and ideas relating to inclusive early childhood education. Our film producer, Duncan, has recently carried out a scoping visit to plan which locations in Ukraine he and the film crew will visit later this year. A scoping visit to the second country will happen in a couple of weeks, so watch this space for more news.

World Bank’s Inclusive Education Initiative is inviting stakeholders involved in disability-inclusive education to participate in a survey about a community of practice for disability-inclusive education. The survey will take about 5 minutes.

World Bank’s Inclusive Education Initiative is a Multi-Donor Trust Fund to invest in catalytic technical expertise and knowledge resources that support countries in making education more inclusive for diverse children with disabilities, with a view to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4.

The survey is anonymous. However, if you would like to receive further information about the development of the World Bank’s community of practice or if you want to be involved, please also provide your name and email address when you complete the survey.

On the 27 June CBM celebrated the anniversary of Helen Keller’s birth by launching its Guidelines on Best Practice for Persons Living with Deafblindness.

These guidelines, available in English (with Spanish to follow soon), aim to assist governments, education agencies, public and private service providers, professionals and family members to build meaningful and appropriate programmes for persons living with deafblindness in low- and middle-income countries.

The guidelines identify the knowledge and skills needed to enable and empower persons living with deafblindness to reach their full potential and become successful contributing members of society. They outline many considerations for service implementation and contain stories from persons living with deafblindness.

More information about the guidelines, deafblindness and Hellen Keller is available in CBM’s news release.

An article written by members of the EENET team has just been published in the International Journal of Inclusive Education. The article is entitled: ‘Time to stop polishing the brass on the Titanic: moving beyond ‘quick-and-dirty’ teacher education for inclusion, towards sustainable theories of change’.

The article takes a critical look at the way many teacher training programmes for inclusive education are designed. It analyses some of the assumptions that are common in inclusive education training programmes, reflects on why the assumptions may not be accurate, explains the consequences of basing training programmes on inaccurate assumptions, and looks at alternative approaches.

Experiences from a teacher training programme in Zambia and Zanzibar are featured in a case study, illustrating ideas for how to move away from ‘quick-and-dirty’ training approaches towards higher quality, longer-term teacher education for inclusion.

There are 50 e-prints of the article available to download for free from the journal publisher’s website. Please feel free to get a copy.

If you do not manage to get one of these free downloads, you can also find a manuscript version of the article on EENET’s website:

Download manuscript in PDF.

Download manuscript in Word.

We hope you enjoy reading the article and please do share your thoughts on the subject of inclusive education teacher training.

Making a film with a limited budget is challenging and requires a lot of careful planning and preparation. One of the first tasks in our new project to make some inclusive early childhood education videos is therefore to write some storyboard outlines.

The storyboards describe what we want to film – which topics we want to cover and what the main facts or arguments are. We also brainstorm ideas for the sort of footage or images that might help us illustrate these facts and arguments. Because we are making a training video and filming in real-life schools and communities, our storyboards are a bit like wish-lists, showing all the things we hope we can film. It’s not like making a fictional movie where the director can make anything happen, using actors and computer-generated images! In reality we won’t be able to find and film all of the experiences on our wish-list, but we have some extra ideas up our sleeve this time to help with filling gaps.

Once the storyboards have been drafted, we will carry out scoping visits to two countries, so watch this space for news about which countries have been selected.

A few weeks ago we held an online consultation meeting. We asked participants to reflect critically on our existing video-based teacher training resource (‘An Inclusive Day‘) and to help us think about what additional or different messages are needed for a training resource aimed specifically at inclusive early childhood education practitioners.

Through the meeting and written inputs we received loads of fantastic ideas – enough to make 10 more films! We’ve been analysing all the ideas, ready for the next step – developing storyboards.

What is the most important message you think we should include in a video about inclusive early childhood education? Tell us your ideas!

Visit the ECE project section of our website for more information about the project.

EENET has compiled a 5-minute video – ‘Is our Teaching Inclusive?’ – for the British Council based on our ‘An Inclusive Day: Building foundations for learner-centred, inclusive education’ video-based teacher training on inclusion.

The edited video was shown at the British Council’s signature event at the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) International Conference in Liverpool in April 2019.

The British Council’s event at the conference was entitled ‘Is English Teaching Inclusive? Do we practise what we preach?’. Videos of many of the sessions from the conference, including the British Council session, are available online.

We also recommend watching the opening session at the IATEFL conference by Paula Rebolledo entitled ‘Teacher empowerment: leaving the twilight zone’. It is a very engaging and powerful analysis of teacher empowerment issues.

During the next year EENET will be developing a new video-based training resource. It will be similar to EENET’s ‘An Inclusive Day’ training resource, but this time focusing on inclusive early childhood education.

We will provide regular updates so you can follow our progress as we develop the storyboards, carry out location scoping visits, start filming in various locations, embark on a huge editing process, write the training manuals, and then build up to launching the new resource in mid-2020.