Journal on Education in Emergencies Volume 9, Number 1

The research articles, field notes, and book reviews featured in JEiE Volume 9, Number 1 focus on refugee education and aspirations, social and emotional learning and literacy, teachers’ agency and self-concept, peacebuilding, and education responses to COVID-19, among other important themes.

JEiE’s Nathan Thompson, Samantha Colón, and Dana Burde introduce the key themes and novel contributions made to EiE evidence in the research articles, field notes, and book reviews presented in JEiE Volume 9, Number 1.

Silvia Mila Arlini et al. describe the impact of a remedial education program designed to raise the literacy levels and SEL skills of students ages 8 to 13 and support their aspirations to stay in school after the COVID-19-related closures in two conflict-affected states in Myanmar.

Gudrun Østby et al. assess the differential effects COVID-19-related school closures had for refugee and host community boys and girls in Bangladesh. They find that the closures were especially detrimental to teenage refugee girls’ ability to resume their schooling after the pandemic.

In their systematic review of SEL interventions in EiE contexts, Rena Deitz and Heddy Lahmann argue that studies that disaggregate intervention outcomes by age and gender provide the best guidance for tailoring interventions to the beneficiaries’ particular developmental and social realities.

Hassan Aden draws from semistructured interviews and goal-mapping exercises to explore the cultural logics of hope, hard work, and success among refugee youths living in Dadaab as they pursue scholarships that will support their higher education aspirations and enable them to resettle abroad.

Drawing from ethnographic research on teachers in post-earthquake Indonesia, Christopher Henderson relates how global-level actors often miss the opportunity to engage meaningfully with teachers’ agency, self-concept, and resilience in humanitarian response guidance and policymaking.

Katrina Barnes et al. offer lessons from a participatory research initiative conducted with refugees in Rwanda and Pakistan, including how to navigate youth researchers’ positionality, training, and remuneration, and how to accommodate participants’ varying levels of research skills.

Jennifer Flemming et al. apply a resilience framework to the pandemic response in Colombia, Georgia, Lebanon, Nigeria, and Zambia to identify the practices, structures, and resource flows these systems leveraged to absorb, adapt, or transform the shock to their education systems from COVID-19.

HaEun Kim, Mirco Stella, and Kassahun Hiticha reflect on the challenges COVID-19 created for the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees project and the project’s efforts to support learning continuity, including allowing students, mentors, and instructors to collaborate on creative solutions.

Kate Sykes outlines the TEAM Girl Malawi model for providing inclusive distance education to students living in extreme poverty, students with disabilities, and girls who are at risk of early marriage. It includes paper-based delivery, resilience and SEL skills, and in-person support from teachers.

Ana María Restrepo-Sáenz and Emmanuel Neisa Chateauneuf describe the rollout and scaling during COVID-19 of La Aldea, a learner-centered, culturally relevant multimedia education initiative for out-of-school children, internally displaced children, and refugee populations in Colombia.

In her review of Meaningless Citizenship, Samaya Mansour describes how Sally Wesley Bonet weaves the themes of refugee resettlement, citizenship, belonging, and state resettlement policies into her narrative on the education and workforce journeys of four Iraqi families resettling in the US

Orelia Jonathan reminds JEiE readers of the complex relationship between education and peacebuilding as she reflects on S. Garnett Russell’s investigation in Becoming Rwandan of the Rwandan government’s efforts to create a cohesive national identity after the 1994 genocide.

In her review of Teaching Peace and Conflict, Myuri Komagiri engages with Vanner, Akseer, and Kovinthan Levi’s Intersecting Roles of Education in Conflict framework. Komaragiri stresses the need to prioritize the education-as-transformer role for education to contribute effectively to peacebuilding.

In her review of Youth-Led Social Movements and Peacebuilding in Africa, Deanna Pittman extends volume editor Ibrahim Bangura’s call to action to EiE audiences: resist the suppression of youth voices and give young activists a platform to be agents of social, economic, and political change.