Category: Blog

“Around the world, people are rethinking their ways of working: whether due to the increasingly incandescent disaster that is human-driven climate change or the more recent outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). This is an opportunity to develop and implement better ways of working and deliver greater, more sustainable impact that decolonises existing power relations.”

‘Climate change – rethinking the way we work’ by Rachel Bowden with Juliette Myers and Anise Waljee, EENET, 15 March 2020

Rethinking who the experts are

Three years have passed since we published the blog entry quoted above. The COVID-19 pandemic became an opportunity for EENET to radically change the way it worked. For almost two years all our work was done remotely, through online meetings, emails, and text messaging. The change that excited us was the increased opportunity to work with, support and mentor local expertise.

EENET has always been committed to supporting education stakeholders, consultants, advocates and trainers within the countries where we work to become more experienced and skilled. We used to ask donors and clients for budgets and timelines that would enable our international consultants to work alongside and mentor national counterparts, with the longer-term ambition of reducing or removing the need for international consultants in many activities. But some clients and funders did not want to pay for the extra cost or take the extra time, preferring only to fund the international consultants’ costs and leaving it to ‘someone else’ to support national expert capacity building.

When COVID-19 stopped all international travel, suddenly the vital importance of national consultants, advocates and trainers could not be ignored. We invested a lot of energy (and client/donor funds) into quickly developing ways to remotely support and mentor a range of personnel in countries where we were involved in projects so that they could carry out work previously done by visiting international consultants. Of course, it would have been easier if we had been able to work consistently on this process over a long period before the pandemic, rather than it being an emergency measure.

Discussions around power relationships and institutional inequality in humanitarian and development work are not new. The discourse received impetus in May 2020 when the killing of George Floyd by US police spotlighted institutional racism around the world. And the pandemic offered an unusual opportunity to interrupt further the balance of power among experts in development and humanitarian work. But where are we heading now?

International consultants can travel again, and NGO and government budgets are squeezed by economic crises. What will happen if clients/donors revert to the pre-2020 routine of employing international consultants and strive to avoid the extra cost and time often needed to simultaneously intensively mentor local expertise? What if they choose only to work with the (usually less expensive) national consultants, advocates and trainers who were fast-tracked into new roles during the pandemic but refuse to take (financial) responsibility for further professional development for them?

EENET calls on donors and NGOs to value the (perhaps unplanned and unintended) progress of interrupting the reliance on international consultants and find ways to keep investing in challenging the balance of power among inclusive education experts.

Rethinking our environmental impact

The pandemic made it much easier for EENET to move towards its environmental policy ambitions – stopping harmful international travel was easy when no travel was allowed! In 2022, travel fully resumed and projects expected international consultants to return to in-person work. This reignited dilemmas for EENET around how we move towards reducing our carbon footprint.

We are also challenged to rethink EENET’s core networking and information-sharing activities. Since we were established in 1997, we have prioritised providing hard-copy materials to education stakeholders considered ‘hardest to reach’. Free printed materials for those without internet access is something we still passionately support. But how do we square that with the environmental impact of printing and sending materials around the globe? And how do we afford it now that printing and international postage and courier costs are soaring? But if we don’t maintain hard-copy distribution, how can we reach our important offline audience, because EENET cannot single-handedly fix the digital divide?

We haven’t got all the answers! But here are some steps we have taken:

Localised printing (i.e., funding partners or cost sharing with partners in certain countries to print and distribute copies of Enabling Education Review). The printing is not necessarily cheaper, but we save money on international shipping and reduce our environmental impact. The downside is that this passes an extra workload to the selected partners who must get quotes, supervise the printing process and then distribute the copies. It also means we do intensive distribution in a few countries rather than dispersing copies across many countries.

USB flashdrives. We have distributed hundreds of flashdrives containing our video training packages, all editions of Enabling Education Review, and dozens of other inclusive education guides, training packages and posters. In a tiny package, we can distribute an entire library which the recipient can access without needing the internet. The recipient still needs a computer or tablet, of course. The downside is that flashdrives can be subject to customs duties on arrival, although we try to pre-pay duty wherever the option exists, and flashdrives often get ‘lost’ in the postal system.

You can order an EENET flashdrive through our online shop.

Hand-delivery. We have always ensured that consultants carry as many EENET materials as possible when they visit a project. These days paying for a little excess luggage on a flight can be cheaper than sending a large package by post or courier. If you are based in the UK, visit education projects in other countries, and would like to take some free EENET materials to distribute to your partners/colleagues, please contact us to make arrangements.

Constant reflection and action for change

During our AGM in 2022, we discussed how to continue reducing our carbon footprint, how to question assumptions around international consultants’ travel to projects, and how to push for change. We recognised that change will be incremental, and probably there will be steps forward and back. But the climate crisis and the urgent need to challenge unequal power relations in development and humanitarian work mean EENET will continue to reflect critically on everything we do and will remain committed to having difficult conversations with donors and clients.

Annette Rebentisch and Ingrid Lewis, EENET

May 2023

Author: Takyiwa Danso, Sightsavers, September 2022

We’re setting homework for global education leaders to protect the rights of children with disabilities. Here’s why we’re doing it.

World leaders and the international education community convene in New York on 19 September at the Transforming Education Summit (TES). The summit will mobilise political ambition, action and solutions to transform the future of education and accelerate progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) – inclusive and equitable education for all children and young people.

In preparation for the summit, over the last few months education ministers have been focusing on the key areas that need attention for transformative change in our education systems: inclusive, equitable, safe and healthy schools; learning and skills for life, work and sustainable development; teachers and the teaching profession; digital learning; and financing of education.

But while discussions have highlighted the many challenges faced by children and young people around the world, the 240 million children with disabilities are being forgotten. Widening inequalities, global austerity cuts to education budgets, the impacts of COVID-19 and climate change threaten the future of learning for all, but the impacts for children with disabilities are disproportionately higher.

What is the issue?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, children with disabilities were already among the most excluded from learning. Nearly 49% of children with disabilities worldwide were likely to have never attended school, and even if they did, they were usually less likely to progress or receive proper support within the school system. Girls with disabilities often experience double discrimination based on their gender and disability, facing even more barriers to participating fully in society.

We know pandemic-related school closures disrupted lives of millions of children around the world, but for many children with disabilities the impact has been devastating. Schools are integral to the life and wellbeing of all children, as places for learning, personal development, socialising and receiving other vital services including meals and hygiene care. But the sudden shift to remote schooling often left children with disabilities unable to continue learning and cut them from the benefits of the school environment.

Pre-existing digital inequalities have worsened. While more than 90% of countries offered some form of distance learning, at least 31% of children were unable to benefit from this due to limited access to internet and technology, inaccessible tools, or lack of access to tools.

Children with disabilities already faced numerous barriers to learning and by not including them in the pandemic recovery, they risk being left behind for good. The window of time to enact change and get back on track to achieve SDG4 is narrowing.

What are we calling for at the summit and why?

Until now, there has been a lack of urgency to use the TES to demand more inclusive education systems. Sightsavers and partners are calling for world leaders to act now so that the 240 million children living with disabilities around the world can access their right to a quality, inclusive education.

We want to see world leaders deliver on their promise to ‘leave no one behind’ by ensuring disability inclusion is fully embedded into their national and global education plans. That’s why through our #DoYourHomework campaign we’re setting world leaders six pieces of homework to build an inclusive education system.

1. Sociology homework: Include children with disabilities in mainstream education and collect data that includes everyone
2. Economics homework: Invest in inclusive training, so that teachers can respond to diverse learning needs and develop flexible curriculums for all children
3. Politics homework: Implement policies, plans and budgets to include and support children with disabilities
4. Computing homework: Tackle the digital divide and ensure digital learning and other education technologies are accessible for all
5. Maths homework: Allocate sustainable financing for inclusive education so that all children with disabilities can learn
6. Design homework: Involve people with disabilities in all stages of inclusive education design and make sure their voices are heard

Through our education work, Sightsavers has demonstrated that change is possible and that when education systems are inclusive, children with disabilities can not only access school but can learn among their peers and thrive.

We have tested approaches that embed inclusive education at all levels of the education system including:

• developing inclusive participatory planning approaches in Nigeria
• training early years caregivers in inclusion in Malawi
• creating learning materials in accessible formats such as braille in Mali.

Governments must adopt these approaches and embed them in policy. Education transformation means doing things differently. Strong political leadership, sufficient financing, and the implementation of robust institutional frameworks founded on inclusion and equity are required to make quality education a reality for all children.

None of this is possible without the voices of people with disabilities at the helm of decision-making. The TES must ensure the full representation and participation of children and youth with disabilities, their families, and their networks. Their knowledge, expertise and experience are key to creating sustainable change.

Time is running out for us get on track to meet SDG4. Priorities defined at the TES have the potential to change the future of education. We’re looking to world leaders to do their homework to ensure education transformation is truly inclusive, so the 240 million children with disabilities worldwide are not left behind.

You can also find this blog on Sightsavers’ website.

This is the first of a series of posts about the 2021 UKFIET conference. Here, we provide an overview of the research presentation that Su Corcoran, Helen Pinnock and Rachel Twigg delivered as part of a panel on disability.

Background to the project

When schools were closed across the globe in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of learners had to learn at home. Their parents and caregivers became responsible for delivering this education. There was an increase in the number and variety of home learning resources available through online platforms, but less focus was put into supporting learners with disabilities, especially in low-income contexts where access to the internet is limited. In partnership with the Norwegian Association of Disabled, EENET set out to develop easy-to-read resources and guidance to support learners,  their parents and caregivers with home learning.

We wanted to make sure that these materials matched a need. Therefore, we sought to understand what support and materials were already being provided for children’s home learning and the barriers learners faced trying to learn at home.

Two surveys were conducted. Over 1000 parents, teachers and other education system stakeholders from 27 countries completed an online survey. A second telephone survey reached 97 parents in Zambia and Zanzibar who had no access to the internet. In our UKFIET presentation, we explored the findings of both surveys, highlighting the major challenges identified by the respondents.

Challenges

The respondents raised the following concerns:

• They mentioned the additional risks faced by children who were already living in poverty. Families who relied on the informal labour market found that their income-generating opportunities decreased as non-essential businesses closed and they struggled to provide for their children.
• The focus on delivering education using radio, television and/or the internet may have provided quick and easy countrywide coverage. However, learners without access to radios, television or the internet were unable to use this provision.
• Parents mentioned uncertainty about how they were expected to take responsibility for their children’s learning. They wanted access to useful guidance, especially on adapting home learning materials.
• Not knowing when schools would reopen caused additional stress and worry for caregivers, indicating a need for mental health support during the crisis.
• Home learning provision did not always consider learners with disabilities. They were often invisible. For example, television programmes did not feature sign language; some mainstream schools stopped their additional rehabilitation and learning support provision; and school closures in some areas meant that access to medication ceased.

Successful experiences

A number of respondents described home learning support they perceived as successful. Despite the challenges mentioned above, lessons disseminated through television and radio broadcasts reached large numbers of learners in some countries such as Eswatini. Elsewhere, there was a focus on the distribution of hard copy materials that families without access to television, radio, or internet appreciated.

The most innovative use of online platforms came through teachers’ and parents’ use of social media. For example, teachers shared short videos through WhatsApp groups and used the platform to make regular contact with children (and their parents). Parents shared resources and other advice with each other through locally established peer-support WhatsApp groups.

In addition:

• In Jakarta, Indonesia, a stipend was available to families through the schools, enabling them to access the internet.
• In England, learners with educational health care plans were allowed to continue attending schools and other education programmes provided by disability centres.
• In northern Syria, electricity was more reliable at night. Night schools were set up that took advantage of this electrical supply.

Recommendations

The respondents suggested that when schools are closed good home learning for ALL learners requires: safe, healthy homes; local support networks for sharing resources and caring for each other’s children; access to electricity and the internet or to reading materials if this is not possible; input and/or support from educators to either provide home learning lessons or adapt general provision to make them accessible to learners with disabilities or additional needs. There is also a need to repair, strengthen or develop existing educational frameworks to improve on the conditions in which children may be expected to learn at home.

From the survey, we have identified five key recommendations:

1. Catch-up education, good nutrition and health support, and effective disability rehabilitation should be a focus to prioritise and encourage recovery from widened equity gaps when schools reopen.
2. Where possible, national human resource development strategies (such as education sector plans and donor support programmes) should prioritise electricity supplies and internet access for schools and wider neighbourhoods.
3. Teachers, schools and other local agencies providing education programmes need autonomy, access to appropriate (e.g. hard copy) resources and the ability to distribute these through their network to reach more children.
4. Learners experiencing crisis are under additional pressure. Learning resources should be designed to fit around the patterns of their lives. Parents need guidance to set up learning routines and adapt resources for children with disabilities and additional learning needs. The content of our home learning resources was therefore designed to integrate learning activities into daily routines.
5. Where possible, plans should be developed to support the mental health of young people and their parents. Such support could be integrated into the process of distributing educational content. It is also important to keep parents up to date on existing plans and possible changes.

More information about the home learning project is available on EENET’s website. Project reports and copies of the home learning resources and guidance can also be found there.

This blog post is based on data analysis conducted by Su Lyn Corcoran, Helen Pinnock and Rachel Twigg. The wider project team involved in developing the data generation, language translation, and project management for the surveys and the creation of the home learning resources includes: Sandrine Bohan-Jacquot, Hasmik Ghukasyan, Cotilda Hamalengwah, Alexander Hauschild, Mustafa Himmati, Said Juma, Moureen Kekirunga, Khairul Farhah, Khairuddin, Polly Kirby, Ingrid Lewis, Oleh Lytvynov , Duncan Little, Emma McKinney, Aubrey Moono, Alick Nyirenda, Ayman Qwaider, Paola Rozo, Hayley Scrase, Anise Waljee, and Jamie Williams.

Over the last year we have all found ourselves in an unusual situation. Our theme for the next edition therefore draws on the work being done to support children’s learning as we have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures. It will also look at the broader context of what it means to learn at home.

The theme for the 2021 edition of Enabling Education Review will be:

 “Home learning”

The deadline for submitting first drafts of articles is 31 March 2021. *EXTENSION – new deadline now 30 April 2021*

Details of suggested topics and how to submit articles are provided below.

Contact info@eenet.org.uk with any questions.

Why have we chosen this topic?

Many children learned at home before the COVID-19 pandemic for various reasons. For example, they may have been denied access to school, or their parents may have chosen home schooling as their preferred approach. Plus of course most children experience a great deal of informal learning at home, even if they also go to school.

Learning at home has often been seen as separate from mainstream education and not part of the movement towards inclusive education. EENET has always argued that, with the right strategies, approaches and support in place, learning at home can be considered an integral contribution to an inclusive education system.

Over the last year, COVID-19 school closures meant millions of children suddenly had to learn at home, and their teachers and education ministries had to work out how to facilitate that. One of the biggest challenges has been ensuring that learning at home is inclusive of every learner.

In early 2020 EENET, through our partnership with Norwegian Association of Disabled, launched a project to explore home learning and the education experiences of stakeholders during the widespread lockdowns. Using evidence from a survey, we developed a home learning guidance poster and booklet for families. These resources recognise that home education can be extremely stressful for learners and families, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. They also show that home learning is always relevant, whether or not schools are open, and we can do more to weave effective learning at home into high quality inclusive education systems.

What has been your experience as a teacher, parent, family member, learner, or other stakeholder involved in education? Was home learning a new experience for you during the pandemic, or is it something you have been involved with for a long time? How do you cope with or support learning at home? What works well and what is challenging? What support did or do you receive, or would you like to receive?

What could you write about?

There are many aspects of home learning that you could write about, including but not limited to:

• What has been done to ensure emergency-response or long-term home learning initiatives promote inclusion and are inclusive for all learners?
• How are inclusive home learning initiatives financed and managed?
• As a parent/caregiver/learner – how have you advocated at the local or national level for home learning provision to be more inclusive.
• As a teacher – what did you do to reach and support all your learners when schools were closed? What problems did you solve to help you reach and support more/all learners? Who helped you?
• For learners who were already learning at home before the pandemic, how has their home learning been affected (positively or negatively) by the changes in the education system resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic?
• How have approaches to learning changed as a result of responsibility for learning shifting heavily onto parents and families for prolonged periods?
• How does home learning affect the mental and physical well-being of learners, parents, families, and teachers?
• What lessons have we learned from the COVID-19 home learning experiences that we could use to improve the design and inclusivity of education systems long term?

Enabling Education Review helps people share and learn from each other’s experiences. We therefore welcome articles that offer practical insights, to help others who are looking for ideas that they can adapt and try. We like articles that provide a little background to the context, project or programme, and then explain in more detail the activities that happened (what, where, when, with or by whom, and why). We also like to read about the results, if possible.

For more information on how you can submit an article please download the full call for articles.

Call for Articles (Arabic).

Author: Ingrid Lewis

This is a presentation given at a webinar for GIZ Jordan, July 2020.

What is this presentation about?

Inclusive education is not just about schools. Genuinely inclusive education systems look at a continuum of learning experiences and support, from home and community, to non-formal settings, through to formal education institutions. Often, inclusive education programmes focus narrowly on schools. The Covid-19 crisis reminds us that education is – and has to be – about much more than the formal school system. In this presentation I’ll share some thoughts on how to position home learning in the discussions on rebuilding and improving education systems.

How did we get here?

 When Covid-19 caused schools around the world to close, it was hard to predict the full implications – for learners, their families and communities, and for education systems and countries as a whole. The speed, complexity and rigour of government responses and reach varied massively, even within countries.

In many countries, schools are now re-opening, often in phases, such as exam-year students returning first. Some have decided not to re-open this year. Some are attempting to follow social distancing rules, such as limiting the numbers of children allowed in classrooms, and breaking classes into smaller groups who attend at different times or on different days. Thousands of schools around the world are asking: how can we stay safe with 60+ children per class and no water for handwashing?

Re-opening schools presents multiple challenges:

• how to help learners ‘catch up’ with months of missed education;
• how to teach classes of learners who are now probably more academically diverse than ever;
• how to deal with the ongoing absence of many learners, because of their own or other family members’ health or vulnerability;
• the inevitable growth in drop-out rates where families need or want their children to work or get married instead of returning to school;
• the ever-present risk that the pandemic will force schools and society to shut down again.

While it feels wrong to talk about positives in a situation that has been devastating for so many people, I do want us to think about the potential positive inclusion-oriented opportunities that now exist.

Lessons from the home learning experience

EENET believes that to develop an inclusive education system, we need to be reflective and critical – learn from every experience; think how we could do better next time; and listen to colleagues, learners, families and communities.

To rebuild and reform education systems now, we must reflect critically on the experiences of home learning during Covid-19. What can we learn that will help us move forward with a more inclusive, higher quality education system?

There are various clear messages emerging from this experience – I’m focusing on just a few that feel particularly relevant to inclusive education.

1. Persistent interpretations (mis-interpretations) of what education is undermine inclusivity.

The crisis highlighted in many places the obsession with seeing education only as a highly academic, exam-driven process.

EENET’s rapid global survey revealed that parents, caregivers and family members in diverse countries felt under immense pressure to maintain high standards of academic learning at home. Sometimes this pressure came from the government, schools and teachers who provided complex instructions for how parents could – overnight – become multi-subject, multi-grade teachers. Sometimes the pressure came from friends, neighbours or from parents themselves – like it was a competition to see whose child would be furthest ahead when schools re-opened.

Such pressure probably emerged because a pressurised academic system is all that most people have ever experienced in their life – so they had nothing else to use as a template for planning learning at home.

2. Equality in learning is not just about equal access to school.

Many families and learners have been overwhelmed by the quantity of online learning materials available, and many more have been demoralised by having no access to any such materials. Families have felt despair because they could not offer the time, support, or materials they wanted for their children whilst learning at home. Such inequality of learning opportunities and support of course happened all the time before the crisis, but this really hit the spotlight when schools closed.

3. Education systems do not provide what learners really need in order to participate and learn.

Many crisis responses – from government and non-government sources – focused on advising parents how to teach every topic in the curriculum, how to make a timetable covering every subject, how to motivate children to learn all day. Worryingly there was even a growing discourse on how parents could assess and grade their children’s work. This followed the established school-based exam-oriented formula, but arguably was not what most learners (or their families) actually needed during this crisis.

By contrast, we were encouraged by examples of innovations from some teachers, families and learners who rejected high-pressure academic expectations and chose to ‘go with the flow’ – throwing away timetables and curricula and responding flexibly and spontaneously to what was happening in the home and to how families and children were feeling each day. This is the kind of flexibility that characterises inclusive education; the kind of flexibility that the formal education system in many contexts did not offer during this crisis.

4. To build an inclusive education system we must acknowledge that the system is the problem, not the child.

This is a key concept in inclusive education. It is not the child’s fault they struggle to learn, but the teacher’s responsibility to teach better or the curriculum developer’s responsibility to create a more accessible and flexible curriculum, and so on. Throughout the crisis a lot of discussion has focused on how education systems can help children – especially the most marginalised – ‘stay on track’ with the expected learning programme at home, or get ‘back on track’ when schools re-open. This discourse seems rooted in ‘child-as-problem’ thinking – based on an assumption that the system will be the same when schools re-open and the child will have to do something special to keep up or catch up.

In developing our own response, EENET (through its partnership with Norwegian Association of Disabled) chose to offer families simple accessible materials that prioritise family and learner mental wellbeing whilst highlighting accessible learning opportunities available in day-to-day life. Our message was “everything you are already doing at home can be a relaxed and fun learning opportunity. Use what you have in the home and community, use what feels comfortable right now, use what interests you. Value real-life learning and skills-building not just information retention.”

Building inclusive education systems that value the home learning experience

Of course EENET’s response was not unique. Around the world many individuals and groups have promoted similar responses. But the big question is, to what extent will education systems endorse such messages? Will they value the real-life lessons children have learned during lockdown? Will they recognise the importance of the social, physical, intellectual, communication and emotional skills that learners have developed through their home learning experiences, if such skills and competencies are not measured through the existing exam system? When schools re-open, will education systems want ‘business as usual’ as fast as possible, or will they embrace change and do what the learners really need?

If education systems stick rigidly to pre-crisis ways of organising, facilitating and examining learning, they will build a barrier to millions of children who did not – and had no possible chance to – ‘keep up’ during school closures, or who cannot now return to school as quickly or regularly as their peers, due to health or other reasons.

‘Building back better’ after Covid-19 has to involve developing an education system that values a much wider interpretation of what learning, competency and skills development is about, and that responds to the individual child’s needs instead of expecting the child to keep up, catch up, or adapt in some other way.

Education systems have to recognise the learning that happened in homes and acknowledge that what families achieved has real value and contributes positively to children’s education and futures. As schools re-open, millions of parents and caregivers feel nervous about what is going to happen to their children. They don’t just fear for their children’s safety at school, they are scared that their children will now fail and that everything they as parents tried to do during lockdown will be considered wrong or inadequate by teachers and officials.

The best way now to say “actually we do value your home learning experiences” would be to work on properly embedding learning at home into the education system. By this I certainly do not mean we should dump more work and responsibility on parents or exclude more learners from school!! I simply mean we need to focus on the idea that an inclusive education system is a continuum of learning – from birth and home, through community-based informal learning opportunities, through to more structured non-formal learning and formal school-based learning.

Given that for months learning was a home and community-based process, we now need to ask how schools and the curriculum can more effectively connect with the community and learners’ home lives.

Why bother?

Why should we radically redesign the education system when we could just treat the home learning period as an unfortunate blip in history and return to normal as fast as possible?

For a start, the crisis is not over yet. Schools are not all open full time, for all year groups, and in some places the need for social distancing and quarantine will keep many children out of school for months to come. Home learning is not history yet.

Sometimes big changes only happen after a crisis. A crisis gives us an opportunity that socially, economically or politically might not have been possible before.

But home learning is not just something that is necessary as a crisis response. At all ages, children learn huge amounts at home and in the family and community. Some children rely more than others on opportunities to learn at home, such as children with disabilities, chronic health conditions, behavioural challenges, mental ill-health, children living in poverty or remote places, etc – all of whom may start school late or be unable to attend as much as their peers. If we had a system that valued learning at home – and invested in supporting home and community-based learning opportunities – imagine how many more children could benefit from education. I do not mean as an alternative to attending mainstream schools, but as an extra option on a continuum of flexible learning opportunities.

Crises like Covid-19 are predicted to become more frequent. We owe it to future generations to become better prepared. If we have education systems that value home and community-based learning, focused on real-life relevant skills development and not just school-based, academic knowledge retention, then future crises like this will be less of a shock. We’ll have mechanisms in place that can more easily be scaled up; teachers will already be used to supporting formal and informal learning in and beyond the classroom; families will be more familiar with supporting learning at home, and they’ll feel more confident that whatever support they can give is valuable to their children’s futures.

Inclusive education has never been a simple checklist of school-based actions. It’s never been as simple as building ramps in schools, providing Braille books and hearing aids, and sending teachers on a few training courses (although sadly many programmes have operated on that basis!). Inclusive education has always been about innovation, finding different ways to approach teaching and learning so that everyone joins in and benefits. The home learning experience has handed us a wealth of potential ideas to feed inclusive education innovations

How many countries will take the opportunity to learn and change, and how many will simply fall back into the old routine as quickly as possible – oblivious to the fact that ‘business as usual’ is now excluding more leaners than ever?

This short video was recorded by a 6-year old Syrian student, Aytan. She is a 1st-grade student living in the Syrian capital of Damascus. Like her peers, Aytan lives every day with the unfolding news around the COVID19 pandemic worldwide. She is determined to help stop the spread of the virus. Aytan, with support from her mum, looked for ways to learn about the virus and share this with others. Aytan therefore organised this short video with a message to raise awareness of the virus.

Her video doesn’t just have a life-saving message. It was a very important child-led learning activity at a time when schools are closed, and it was fun for Aytan to organise. Having some fun while learning at home can help reduce stress for the child and their family.

This activity used drama, body language and a public speaking skill, all of which contribute to a child’s development and learning. A key component of quality education is when there is consistency between what is happening in the real world and the learning environment. Education is also about learning values, not just learning facts. Through preparing for and organising this video, Aytan learned about how humans can help each other.

The important takeaway message from Aytan’s video activity, is that there are always learning opportunities for children, and these can always involve having fun, even in the most difficult circumstances.

By Rachel Bowden with Juliette Myers and Anise Waljee.

I spent most of last week in a hipster co-working space in Berlin, designing a training course with a team of Syrian development professionals. Next week, the team will lead the training from Berlin, over the internet, in Arabic. Facilitators in Syria will help to guide participants through activities and take the lead through the inevitable internet black-outs.

I drafted the course using the terms of reference, background research with staff and the pool of resources available through EENET. In Berlin, we worked through it together: day by day, session by session, activity by activity. We took it in turns to lead, talked a lot, and made endless notes and changes. At the end of the week the course was transformed – activities, sessions, days restructured in a way that somehow made sense to us all. During the course participants will take a similar role: trying out and adapting activities to use with children, caregivers and formal education staff in North East Syria.

So what? You might ask.

Well, this way of working – using remote platforms to develop and deliver content collaboratively using a blend of face-to-face and online training and facilitation methodologies – may quickly become the norm. In addition to delivering powerful benefits around collaboration and capacity building, such approaches have cost benefits too. The cost of a week’s consultancy, including flights, accommodation, hotel expenses, time spent on a scoping visit, involving many stakeholders and participatory activities, followed by report writing compares unfavourably with a model which allows those same stakeholders to work together to evolve course content over 3-4 days, a process from which partnerships are strengthened and everyone learns and builds their capacity to deliver the content in the next phase.

Last week at EENET’s annual general meeting we had a lively discussion around our environment policy, which brought home the necessity of rethinking our ways of working in light of the global climate emergency. We agreed that flying around the world to ‘do consultancies’ cannot be the default way of working. We committed to exploring alternative and innovative approaches to support education stakeholders, partners and clients as they develop more inclusive education systems and approaches.

In my current project, the conflict in Syria leaves little choice than to work remotely. It ‘forces’ us to work in a way that is, in many ways, more desirable than ‘business as usual’. Humanitarian and development work is too often planned like a factory assembly line following the programme cycle, with ‘technical’ expertise brought in as an ‘input’ at isolated stages. Managers become administrators, removed from the expertise of practitioners or researchers in their area of work. As technical consultants we might rail against these established practices but it is hard to change them.

But now, around the world, people are rethinking their ways of working: whether due to the increasingly incandescent disaster that is human-driven climate change or the more recent outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). This is an opportunity to develop and implement better ways of working and deliver greater, more sustainable impact that decolonises existing power relations. For instance, consultants with technical expertise that is lacking at country level can work closely in a coaching relationship with partners to plan, implement, monitor and evaluate projects so that everyone is more engaged and expertise is developed, shared and capacity is steadily built.

EENET has considerable experience with social networks, video-based training courses, websites, WhatsApp groups, webinars and newsletters, and has long been committed to building education stakeholder capacity. There are emerging examples of global good practice of remote working, particularly in humanitarian contexts. Teachers working in Kakuma Refugee Camp, for example, are able to access mentoring and real-time support from global experts on the challenges they face in teaching day to day. We are keen to document more experiences like these and explore innovative approaches for working remotely.

If you have approaches to share, please get in touch. We would love to help other organisations to access more evidence-based information about alternatives to ‘business as usual’, to help improve project impact and redress north-south imbalances.

Like climate change, Coronavirus reminds us of the need for local and global action. Individuals must take personal responsibility for their actions, community and governments must guide and lead. International exchange – of science, of practice – remains vital. Now, more than ever, we need to define transnational communities and ways of communicating.

By: Sandrine Bohan-Jacquot

Design workshop

At the start of 2019 I was incredibly lucky to be one of the 23 participants attending the 18th International Creativity workshop on ‘Toy Design and Inclusive Play’ in Berlin, Germany. Participants came from Belgium, Colombia, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Lithuania, Philippines, Russia, Thailand, Uganda, USA, Zimbabwe.

You can now watch a video about the workshop, featuring some of the innovative, inclusive toys created by the participants.

The annual workshop was organised by Fördern durch Spielmittel e.V., and is a unique opportunity for designers, psychologists, teachers and social development consultants to interact with groups of people with special needs ranging from children and toddlers to senior citizen.

In total, 23 toys, games and playful products were designed and developed by participants during the 2-week workshop, with support from toy design tutors. There was a final exhibition, opened by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Each toy was discussed to see how it can be produced commercially or how ‘do-it-yourself’ instructions could be published for parents, teachers and carers.

Site visits

The participants visited various inclusive and special kindergartens, schools for children with disabilities and institutions for elderly people with dementia. My group visited the Helene Haeusler special school[1] for primary-age children with intellectual disabilities; 60% of the children do not speak.

The school has very accessible buildings and an incredible range of services, including physiotherapy, speech therapy, a relaxing room, swimming pool, wood workshop, etc. We observed the learning process in a class and my attention was drawn to a 7-year-old boy with physical disabilities and hyperactivity. His uncontrolled movements and constant fidgeting presented a challenge to the teacher as she led the class through the morning routine with a song. I started wondering how I could help this child and his teacher.

Benno, a soothing cushion

With the support of my tutor, Naama Agassi,[2] Designer and University Teacher, I created a soothing cushion. I called the cushion ‘Benno’; a German name which refers to bear, the symbol of Berlin, and means strong and brave.

I was inspired by the willow tree which bends with the wind rather than resisting it (see the story below). The cushion aims to accompany the child’s movements rather than trying to prevent an irrepressible neurological need. The cushion allows the child to sit, move and fidget silently. The child can sit or lie on the cushion. It has two sides; one with a soft fabric for comfort and one filled with spelt balls to accompany the movements. It comes with two small pillows filled with a selection of objects to feel, fidget and play with silently. All elements are noiseless and not too playful in order to be acceptable in class. The selection of elements was adapted for a particular child but could be changed according to needs. It is made of natural material (cotton, wood, cereals and sand) with peaceful colours. Elements are removable for washing.

Several teachers visiting the exhibition asked if they could take pictures of the cushion and its elements because they knew children who would find it useful. I was delighted and hope many more teachers and parents will use and adapt ‘Benno’ to their needs.

Photos:

1. The cushion (soft side) and the covers of the small pillows.
2. The cushion (side filled with spelt balls).
3. Five fidgeting activities are available with each pillow. Shown here: sand fascination; twisting fun; flipping pleasure; merry twirling; spinning enjoyment.
4. Five fidgeting activities are available with each pillow. Shown here: surprise pocket; eternal gliding; pure softness; soothing touch; wood treasure.

The oak and the willow, a fable

In a field, there was an oak tree at one end, and a willow tree at the other. Whenever the wind moved through the field, the willow swayed in the wind, while the oak remained unmoved. When this happened, the willow said to itself, “I wish I was as strong as the oak, instead of bending over with every breeze”.

One day a large wind storm whipped through the field. When the storm passed, and the darkness lifted, the willow looked across the field and was shocked to discover that the oak was lying on the ground, broken. When the gardener came into the field, the willow said, “Oh sir, what happened to the oak? How is it that I survived the storm, weak as I am, and the oak fell?”

The gardener said, “Oh little willow tree, do you not understand what happened? When the winds blow, you bend with them, while the oak remains still. So when a really powerful wind comes along, you can bend with the wind, and survive it. But the oak cannot bend, and so if the wind is strong enough, it will break. For the oak had a secret, a weakness within that no one looking at the outside could see”. The gardener went on his way, leaving the willow to ponder what he said.

Strength within and strength without are not the same, and it’s important to cultivate our inner strength first. The willow also shows us the importance of ‘going with the flow’ rather than resisting. The Benno toy does this, it enables the child to channel his/her movements in a comfortable way rather than trying to prevent the movements.

Sandrine is a former consultant with EENET. She now works as Inclusive Education Policy Officer with Humanity and Inclusion.

[1] http://www.helene-haeusler-schule.de Helene Haeusler was a German designer, well known for her line of toys called ‘burlap beasts’ that sought to help children and adults with intellectual or motor disabilities.

[2] https://www.naamaagassi.com/en/projects