Journal on Education in Emergencies: Volume 7, Number 2

This special issue of JEiE contributes to the evidence for the need to incorporate PSS and SEL programming into EiE responses. It presents examples of the progress being made toward developing, validating, and using new, culturally relevant tools for measuring mental health and wellbeing among students experiencing crisis and conflict, and the teachers, parents, and caregivers who support them.

Ragnhild Dybdahl and James Williams, the lead editors for this special issue of JEiE, elaborate on the aims of the issue, its key messages, and the contributions made by the many authors of JEiE Volume 7, Number 2.

Noting the dearth of robust tools for assessing SEL skills in low-resource and crisis settings, authors Nikhit D’Sa and Allyson Krupar developed a cost-free, open-source measure of self-concept, stress management, perseverance, empathy, and conflict resolution. The measure showed reliability and strong internal consistency in a validation study among 620 Syrian children living in Iraq.

Authors Ha Yeon Kim, Kalina Gjicali, Zezhen Wu, and Carly Tubbs Dolan report on the psychometric soundness of TOOLSEL, an instrument for teachers to use to assess students’ social, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive competencies. They share lessons for its use in the field, based on their experience validating it among 3,361 Syrian refugee youth living in Lebanon.

Authors Moses Olayemi, Melissa Tucker, Mamour Choul, Tom Purekal, Arlene Benitez, Wendy Wheaton, and Jennifer DeBoer collaborated with NGOs and educators to determine the core wellbeing and resilience domains for evaluating a PSS intervention and key local nuances. Their efforts resulted in an instrument that the authors found to be relevant among a sample of students and teachers in South Sudan.

Authors Fernanda Soares, Nina Menezes Cunha, and Paul Frisoli discuss how they created a new tool for measuring teachers’ emotion regulation, perceived stress, emotional exhaustion, and self-efficacy and adapted it to the Salvadoran context. A psychometric factor analysis of data from a sample of 1,659 teachers indicate evidence of the tool’s validity.

Authors Lina María González Ballesteros, José M. Flores, Ana María Ortiz Hoyos, Amalia Londoño Tobón, Sascha Hein, Felipe Bolívar Rincon, Oscar Gómez, and Liliana Angélica Ponguta highlight the impact of an innovative skills-building and psychotherapy program. They show that it improved resiliency among parents and caregivers in 14 municipalities most affected by the armed conflict in Colombia.

Taking a family systems approach, authors Raija-Leena Punamäki, Kirsi Peltonen, Marwan Diab, and Samir R Qouta find that child-parent attachment, parenting styles, and sibling relationships may mediate the perceived benefit of a group therapy program among a sample of children from 325 Palestinian families. They base their findings on family-type data and self-reported PTSD and mental health data.

Authors Shanna Kohn, Kim Foulds, Charlotte Cole, Mackenzie Matthews, and Laila Hussein argue for the need to take a participatory, trauma-informed approach to creating SEL educational media for children affected by the Syrian refugee crisis. They reflect on the collaborative research and consultations that led to Sesame’s Ahlan Simsim production and associated direct support services.

In developing and testing a new instrument, Sergiy Bogdanov and his coauthors offer evidence suggesting that family support, optimism, persistence, health, and social networking are key local concepts for understanding resilience among youth in Eastern Ukraine who experienced the adverse effects of armed conflict.

Arguing the practicality of group-based psychotherapy approaches for humanitarian settings, authors Gloria A. Pedersen, Manaswi Sangraula, Pragya Shrestha, Pooja Lakshmin, Alison Schafer, Renasha Ghimire, Nagendra P. Luitel, Mark J. D. Jordans, and Brandon A. Kohrt describe GroupACT, an observational tool for assessing facilitators’ capacity to provide effective and safe group sessions.

In her review of Can Big Bird Fight Terrorism? Children’s Television and Globalized Multicultural Education by Naomi A. Moland, Kate Lapham reflects on the contradictions and pitfalls facing educational media in highly divided societies.

In her review of the NISSEM Global Briefs, edited by Andy Smart, Margaret Sinclair, Aaron Benavot, Jean Bernard, Colette Chabbott, S. Garnett Russell, and James Williams, Solfrid Raknes points to the practical lessons the book’s contributing authors provide for incorporating SEL principles into classroom practice and education research.

In this commentary, authors Rebecca Winthrop and Helen Shwe Hadani reflect on the social and psychological toll the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on students, including those in high-income countries, as school closures deprive children of opportunities to play and form vital early relationships with classmates and teachers.