Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
‘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]