We Need to Start Talking about Race, Power, and Privilege in the Education in Emergencies Sector

Courtesy of Rethinking Education. Original article published on 16 November, 2020.

‘Education in emergencies’ or EiE, is a fundamental part of any humanitarian response and aims to ensure uninterrupted quality learning opportunities for all ages in situations of crisis. By April 2020, due to the pandemic, the world faced a global education emergency, with 91% of school-age children out of school due to school closures in 184 countries. The Education in Emergencies sector, to its credit, responded quickly, with tools, adapted programmes, reports, strategies, and advocacy campaigns to get children back into school (or to offer alternative modalities) as quickly as possible.

Yet, where was that energy in the response to the Black Lives Matter protests, led predominantly by young people who took to the streets and social media in the midst of a pandemic across the globe to force long overdue conversations around anti-Blackness, anti-racism, power, and privilege? In 2020, these conversations have touched every industry, including the aid sector as COVID-19 has laid bare and exacerbated inequalities, discrimination, and division. More than ever, education needs to be centred around racial equity, yet bar the INEE Statement on Anti-Racism and Racial Equity, released in October, there are few if any resources, articles, inter-agency working groups, or toolkits reflecting on how racism shows up in EiE.

Even prior to the pandemic, those most likely to be excluded from education were disadvantaged due to language, location, gender, and ethnicity. Sriprakesh, Tikly, and Walker’s powerful article describe the silence or ‘erasure of racism’ as being deeply entrenched in education and international development. Whilst I recognise that there are many examples where this field has broken barriers, advocated for inclusion, gender-sensitive pedagogy, multilingual classrooms etc, EiE is also complicit in this erasure. Despite the majority of EiE interventions taking place in formerly colonized countries, along borderlands, hostile frontiers, and resettlement contexts where children become racialized or ‘othered’, rarely does the mention of racism feature in any advocacy, policy, research, or programmatic design.

The irony is that as a sector, we are rooted in the premise of ‘education for all’, conflict sensitivity, and inclusion. Neither does this silence reflect the wider education sector, where, in recent years the South African #Rhodesmustfall campaign has reignited conversations globally on the importance of Indigenous knowledge, culturally-relevant pedagogy, the need to decolonize curriculums, and how colonial legacies, biases, racial and ethnic discrimination continue to exist and play out in classrooms, curricula, campuses, and teacher professional development.

EiE practitioners, academia, and stakeholders need to start having similar conversations because even more so during a crisis, identity markers (such as language, socio-economic status, ethnicity, race, disability, childcare responsibilities, migration status, gender, sexuality, and age) intersect and influence access, meaningful participation, and education transition rates. This is evident from the World Inequality Database on Education (WIDE), where the data demonstrates disparities for different groups play an important role in shaping opportunities for education and life. Whilst disaggregated data on educational experiences in humanitarian contexts is scarce, the Mastercard Secondary education for youth affected by humanitarian emergencies and protracted crisis is one of the few reports to highlight that ‘ethnic marginalization, poverty, and level of urbanicity’ correlate with lower completion rates for conflict-affected countries.

As a researcher and practitioner, I believe having data is key if we want to have equitable education responses. Part of the issue is that we do not ask the questions. Or we mask the problem by using ambiguous language. For example, it is common to hear how refugee, asylum-seeking, and internally displaced children and families face ‘discriminatory policies and practices’ accessing education or once in the classroom, they experience bullying by peers and teachers. Yet rarely is this named as racism. This is a critical oversight and impacts the way that we respond.

Take, for example, Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and Resilience curriculums which are increasingly integrated into EiE projects. Racism is a psychosocial stressor and there is growing evidence that it impacts developmental trajectories and influences self-concept formation and well-being. Often missing from SEL packages and toolkits, designed in distant HQs, are the larger socio-political contexts in which the emergency or humanitarian crises occurred. Why discuss self-and social awareness without considering power and privilege? Why teach relationship skills if the lessons do not reflect on the interpersonal conflicts that result from racism?

This must change. We have to start acknowledging contextually specific formations of racism, especially as ethnonationalism and ethnic strife underlie many of the major conflicts and disorders in the world today. What we cannot underestimate is that educational experiences are norming and as educator Jeff Duncan Andrade points out, failing to acknowledge, address and respond to racial and or ethnic discrimination in classrooms only aids and abets the social reproduction of inequality and exclusion.

To mitigate this, an intersectional and racial equity lens needs to be applied throughout the project design cycle. All EiE practitioners and stakeholders need to be asking:

• How often are local knowledge, expertise, and non-western educational theorists, pedagogies, and frameworks integrated and influential in the way education services are designed, delivered, monitored, and evaluated?
• How are political, historical, and cultural histories, biases, and positionalities reflected upon when designing curriculums, teacher professional development, policy, research and advocacy?
• What does racial literacy mean in this context?
• What is being unacknowledged and therefore, inadequately addressed?
• Are our monitoring, evaluation, and research practices ethical, decolonial, or merely extractive?

Like the rest of the humanitarian sector, we also need a deep interrogation into our structures that produce inequalities. Hugo Slim argued earlier this year that racism is ‘part of our reluctance to localise humanitarian action’. You only need to browse the websites of most INGOs or UN agencies working in this field and you would be hard pushed to find national organizations or even community-led or refugee-led initiatives credited for their role in implementing education responses, despite being the most innovative EiE responders and often responsible for directly implementing the projects. As a sector, the focus on capacity building ‘their’ expertise and ‘competencies’, to manage projects that often partners have limited input into creating, without any acknowledgment that learning should be two-ways, is deeply problematic.

There have been many discussions this year about whether it is even possible to reform humanitarian aid, an industry where Structural racism- which refers to a system in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity is omnipresent. We aim to address “risk, vulnerability, marginalisation, and exclusion but still rely on reproducing the same destructive economic model that drives inequality, environmental destruction, and climate breakdown”.

As a Black mixed-race woman, this dichotomy is not lost on me. In EiE spaces, I’ve often been the ‘only one’ in the room. Living in London, one of the most culturally diverse places on the planet, I’ve felt angry and disappointed about the lack of diversity at INGO headquarters, in global inter-agency working groups, and at speaking panels at academic conferences like UKFIET and CIES. Whilst I do not feel like I have a seat at the table, I fully acknowledge that my dual heritage, being cisgender, non-disabled, with a British passport and English mother-tongue, gives me a foot in the door where quite frankly, thousands are routinely excluded- the very people whose ideas, perspectives and experiences would improve the way education is supported in some of the most complex humanitarian crises.

Our knowledge of the world we live in is situated historically and geographically therefore we cannot as a sector remain silent and non-reflective of our practices when issues of systemic racial and intersectional inequalities continue to be part of the societies and therefore the education systems where we work. This influences our partnership models, staff recruitment, retention and progression, teacher professional development, pedagogy, community engagement, and accountability mechanisms, shaping the classrooms, and temporary learning spaces. For years, education has been one of the most neglected humanitarian sectors, with less than 2% of all funding going towards education in emergencies. It is precisely because there is so little investment in EiE that it is even more important that what we do is fully accountable to affected populations. If we don’t then we are perpetuating inequitable structures, institutions, and praxis and it is the most marginalised people who end up paying the life-long cost of education inequity.

The EiE sector has a tremendous opportunity — and a responsibility — to mobilize efforts to do the hard work of rooting out systemic racism. This will mean having some difficult conversations, reflecting, and readdressing our systems, structures, and approaches to truly strive for quality, inclusive, and protective learning environments.

Jess has spent the past decade working in the field of EiE. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of East London. Her research focuses on diverse young people’s experiences of education in emergencies and whether contemporary practices of Education in Emergencies reinforce colonial legacies.

The views expressed in this blog are the author's own