Navigating Displacement: Challenges and Adaptation Strategies of Teachers in Schools for Internally Displaced Youth
Leading team:
- Dr. Nadav Ehrenfeld
- Dr. Nadav Marco
- Prof. Tal Gilead
Project team:
- Dr. Yael Nurick
- Leah Kurzweil
Brief
Tens of millions are displaced from their homes globally each year due to extreme weather disasters (such as floods, storms, and wildfires) or due to conflicts and violence (such as the October 7 war).
Among other consequences for the youth, displacements involve disruption of schooling.
In response, alternative schooling configurations aim at providing young students with crucial academic, social, and emotional support.
Given the global expected rise in risk of internal displacements, and given the complexity of teaching and learning in these situations, we investigate adaptation strategies aimed at providing continuous education for internally displaced youth.
We ask: What challenges do teachers of displaced students face, how do they respond to these challenges, and how are these teachers being supported professionally?
Empirically, we ground our proposal in the context of the Israeli school system amidst the mass displacement of October 7, 2023, when due to the regional war, populations from the southern and northern borders transitioned for security reasons to other parts of the country.
Methodologically, we interview teachers within three institutional configurations:
(1) provisional schools designed to provide immediate short-term support;
(2) public schools who received displaced students into their institution;
(3) original schools of displaced students during their re-opening period.
Conceptually, we build on the Panarchy framework (Gunderson & Holling, 2002) and the notion of teacher learning ecologies (Ehrenfeld, 2022) to understand adaptations in both levels of individual teachers and institutions.
Implications would provide adaptation strategies for teachers and institutions towards ways to provide continuous education for displaced youth, and ways to support teachers in doing this crucial work.