Journal on Education in Emergencies Volume 8, Number 3

This special issue of the Journal on Education in Emergencies (JEiE) offers empirical research on students’, parents’, and teachers’ experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Syria, and offers lessons for preparing for future disruptions to schooling from fieldwork in Honduras, Lebanon, the US, and elsewhere.

In their editorial note, Emily Dunlop and Mark Ginsburg place the COVID-19 pandemic in historical, political, and social context and summarize the evidence presented in each of the articles in this special issue.

In this literature review, Kathlyn E. Elliott, Katie A. Mathew, Yiyun Fan, and David Mattson map emergent themes from 124 empirical studies, reports, and historic accounts of Ebola, SARS, MERS, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19 to the INEE Minimum Standards Framework to assess priority areas for delivering education during health crises.

In this French-language contribution, Jean-Benoît Falisse et al. examine a “double shock” on education in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: a policy abolishing fees for public primary school and COVID-19. The influx of new students, school closures, and precarious contracts made continuing in the profession untenable for many teachers.

Su Lyn Corcoran, Helen Pinnock, and Rachel Twigg compare experiences of remote learning during COVID-19 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria—evidence which supports inclusive, localized approaches that engage community networks and build caregivers’ capacity as home educators through tailored, easy-to-use guidance materials.

Hannah Hoechner and Sadisu Idris Salisu report findings from participant-recorded verbal diaries, interviews, and news media analysis that suggest that the Nigerian state rationalized forced closures of Qur’anic schools and student deportations by casting Qur’anic education as both a security threat and a public health concern.

Drawing from interviews with teenage mothers, pregnant adolescents, and other community members in Maiwut Town, South Sudan, Anne Corwith and Fatimah Ali highlight factors that contributed to the girls’ resilience and motivation to return to school, including their aspiration for financial freedom and having a role model.

Emma Carter and her co-authors studied factors that influenced whether educators in 298 schools in Rwanda felt prepared to deliver remote education during COVID-19. Differences in preparedness aligned with existing inequalities in Rwanda, the availability of material support, and guidance from a school leader.

Craig Davis and Gustavo Páyan-Luna’s field note explores how COVID-19 spurred the USAID-funded Asegurando la Educación program to bring in-person social and emotional learning activities to scale across Honduras by leveraging social media, short videos, and a sports-based program, among other approaches for both students and teachers.

In this field note, Michèle Boujikian, Alice Carter, and Katy Jordan discuss how the NGO Jusoor borrowed from a software engineering methodology to rapidly test assumptions and refine programming to develop Azima, a WhatsApp-based education program for Syrian refugees living in Lebanon during COVID-19.

Carmen Sherry Brown examines the rollout of a virtual tutoring program she developed with parents of children receiving remote learning in the United States during COVID-19. Her field note offers lessons on implementing web-based tutoring, and on developing in-service and pre-service teachers’ capacity to support online learning.

In this field note, Leena Zahir and Janhvi Maheshwari-Kanoria highlight the Internet-Free Education Resource Bank (IFERB), a library of project-based learning activities and guides that can be used offline and in low-resource contexts. Experience piloting IFERB in five countries suggests it contributed to gains in literacy, numeracy, and 21st-century skills.

In his review of Pandemic Education and Viral Politics, Noah Kippley-Ogman suggests that the editors’ discussion of the viral spread of mis- and disinformation about the pandemic, among other subjects featured in the volume, would be of particular interest to readers from the EiE field.

In her review of Education, Equality and Justice in the New Normal, Deepa Srikantaiah writes that, without sustained grassroots resistance, capitalism and neoliberalism will set the postpandemic “new normal.” Meanwhile, she offers hope in the plurality of approaches to holistic education presented by the volume’s contributing authors.

Changha Lee’s review of Learning, Marginalization, and Improving the Quality of Education in Low-income Countries offers a snapshot of “learners at the bottom of the pyramid” and what the volume’s contributing authors suggest the EiE field must do to support these marginalized and hard-to-reach students.