Download emergency education: theory and practice

‘NOW SHE IS SINGING!’ EMERGENCY EDUCATION IN THEORY AND
PRACTICE
By Fumiyo Kagawa and David Selby, Centre for Sustainable Futures,
University of Plymouth
As we approached Verbovc School, its red roof and white walls stood out brightly
in the April sunshine against the matt browns and greens of the surrounding
fields. To the visitor, Verbovc village appeared a pastoral idyll revealing nothing
to the uninformed eye of the horrors of 1999 when irregular Kosovar Serb troops
and units of the regular Serbian army swept through hill village after hill village
within the almost exclusively ethnic Albanian Municipality of Drenas. They
rounded up and massacred all but the older menfolk. Coming closer to the
School we could see the new wire-fenced graveyard, brightly coloured artificial
flowers on each grave, where the village men were buried. The perimeter of the
graveyard ran against the edge of the school play area. ‘The children like to be
close to their fathers,’ said one teacher before pointing out the wooded hilltop
above the village where the massacre had taken place.
Verbovc School is one of four schools in the Municipality of Drenas where
Caritas Switzerland is now operating a pre-school programme designed to
contribute to the social integration of young children in a post-war, post-trauma
and transformational context. As such, the programme can be located within the
relatively new field of emergency education, that is, education in and/or for
emergency or crisis situations.
The field came to the fore in the 1990s as the ‘fourth pillar’ of humanitarian aid as
conceived in the period of multiple international crises following the end of the
Cold War (the other pillars being food and water, shelter and health care).
Emergency discourse identified two broad types of emergency situation–natural
disasters (such a earthquakes, tsunamis) and human-made crises (such as
violent civil conflict and genocide), but also highlighted the notion of silent or
chronic emergencies (such as the burgeoning numbers of street children globally
and the HIV/AIDS pandemic). ‘Complex emergencies’ are identified as situations
involving two or three of these elements and, as such, calling for a wide range of
issues to be addressed using a multiplicity of integrated initiatives and modalities.
The elements, singly or combined, overwhelm the capacity of a society to cope
by using its own resources alone.
Emergency education has quickly become a contested area, not least over views
as to when an emergency begins and ends. UNICEF conceives of three stages
of emergency: loud (i.e. while the fighting or other trauma continues), transition
and rehabilitation/reconstruction. Others hold that reconstruction, given its
planned and studiedly incremental nature, stands outside the sphere of
‘emergency’.
Proponents also emphasize different educational needs. Some argue that
psychological reconstruction (i.e. dealing with child and adult trauma) is primary
and call for appropriate pedagogical interventions such as story-telling,
therapeutic drawing, drama and writing, music and games. Such approaches
can comprise non-formal education in that they do not necessarily involve, and
should not wait for, the re-opening of the schools.
Others emphasize soonest system reconstruction, school re-opening and
curriculum restoration, dovetailed with which would be modalities for ‘accelerated
learning’ so as to enable the learning deficit caused by disruption to be made
good as speedily as possible. Others, speaking of human-made crisis situations,
maintain that root and branch systemic and curricular renewal are vital in that the
old system and old curriculum in one way or another were complicit in and
helped foment the crisis in the first place. The dangers of cultural imposition by
powerful international bodies, with (weakened) national governments unable to
resist, is an objection put forward to this school of thought.
Yet others insist that not only short term but also long-term attention needs to be
given to the psychosocial nature of learners through the development of
interactive and experiential pedagogies that, by fostering a sense of individual
self-worth and collaborative ethos across the learning community, build prosocial and democracy-reinforcing attitudes of respect, toleration and
peacefulness. Such proponents also emphasize teacher re-training so as to
develop their capacity to facilitate participatory pedagogies effectively and with
confidence.
Different positions within the field of emergency education can be seen as to a
greater or lesser extent aligning with an economic ‘human capital’ view of the
purposes of education on the one hand, or a ‘quality of life’ view of its purposes
on the other. It is the latter school of thought, drawing heavily on the child rights
laid down in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child of 1989,
that tends to articulate more insistently the importance of addressing the
psychosocial concerns intrinsic to child growth and development. Put another
way, emergency education proposals and initiatives can be seen as falling along
a continuum between a narrowly focused economic and more holistic conception
of sustainable and child development.
The Caritas pre-schools in Drenas Municipality involve an exciting mix of
initiatives located at the holistic end of the continuum. The teachers trained
under the auspices of the project are rural women whose previous formal
education was at high school. The (weekend and summer) training comes to
them, road communications and their familial and agricultural duties not easily
allowing for travel to Prishtina, capital of Kosovo, and its university. The women
are trained according to the Swiss Waldorf-based kindergarten approach with its
emphasis over two years of pre-school upon sensory training, social
competence, oral expressiveness, micro and macro movement, social play,
storying, games and artistic expression. The training also draws extensively on
conflict awareness and resolution practices as developed in the field of peace
education. Training also happens continuously ‘on the job’ as the teachers, who
work in pairs, keep reflective ‘competence’ portfolios and join in discussion and
evaluation of the occurrences of each day.
Verbovc pre-school class, like the other Caritas pre-school classes, conveys a
great sense of fun and liveliness, even joyfulness, the teachers handling isolate,
fearful and aggressive children with consummate sensitivity and skill. Many
grandparents and mothers attest to the sea change in behaviours they have
noted in their children since joining the class. ‘She didn’t sing for her family but
now she is singing!’ is one fairly representative comment.
A remarkable aspect of parent/pre-school cooperation is the employment of the
gift economy for payment of parental contributions. When a family cannot pay
the very modest school fee (made necessary by still awaited formal Kosovo
government recognition for the Caritas pre-schools, hence lack of municipal
funding), they are able to recompense the school by in-kind services or gifts.
Hence, family members help build and maintain the schoolroom, make wooden
toys or equipment for the classroom or support the teachers in other ways (such
as helping the children learn traditional crafts and accompanying them on field
visits).
The graveyard is a perpetual reminder of a traumatic past, but Verbovc School is
building for the future – and not just a local future, in that an aim of Caritas is ‘to
contribute experiences to a national kindergarten strategy and national
kindergarten teacher training’ for Kosovo.
Fumiyo Kagawa is Research Assistant at the Centre for Sustainable Futures,
University of Plymouth. Her research area lies along the interface between
emergency education and education for sustainable development. Her latest
article is: ‘Emergency Education: a critical review of the field’, Comparative
Education, vol. 41, no.4, November 2005, 487-503. Email:
[email protected]
David Selby is Professor of Education for Sustainability and Director of the
Centre for Sustainable Futures, University of Plymouth. He visited Kosovo to
undertake an evaluation of the Caritas pre-school project in April 2006. His latest
article is: ‘The Firm and Shaky Ground of Education for Sustainable
Development’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, vol. 30, no.2, July
2006, 351-365. Email: [email protected]