Welcome to the course

Welcome to the course, Transforming Education in Conflict and Crisis Settings. This is the second course in our teacher development series. Watch the video to meet the educators and learn about the topics we will cover in the next three weeks.

This course builds on our first one, called Understanding Education in Conflict and Crisis Settings. We designed this second course after holding workshops in Mae Sot, Thailand. Our partner organisations worked together to plan the content and design.

Online courses that reach many people around the world are often called Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Our course is different because we created it through collaboration. Researchers and learning designers from University College London (UCL) worked with professionals from the Inclusive Education Foundation (InEd) and other organisations on the Thai-Myanmar border. Together, we built a learning experience that is practical and relevant for education professionals working in education-in-emergency contexts. Because the course was co-designed, and because it includes opportunities for participants to share their knowledge and create useful resources together, we have called it a CoMOOC: a Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaboration.

The CoMOOC uses many different teaching methods and conflict-sensitive approaches. These methods were developed by community organisations in our network who work hard to keep education accessible, high-quality, and continuous in challenging places, such as the Thai-Myanmar border and Lebanon. If you want to learn more about the team behind this CoMOOC and the work we have done together, we invite you to visit our blog: CoMOOCs for Transformative Professional Development.

Course Learning Outcomes

When you finish this course successfully, you will be able to use suitable teaching strategies in conflict and crisis settings. Specifically, you will be able to:

1. Apply transformative practices which recognise students’ intersecting identities, using principles from the “Victim, Perpetrator, Liberator, Peacemaker” (VPLP) framework
2. Collaborate effectively with other teachers and the whole school community to support teacher and student wellbeing
3. Reflect critically on your efforts to create a safe and conducive learning environment
4. Apply inclusive teaching methods for classes where students speak different languages
5. Apply inclusive teaching approaches that include and support learners with different needs and abilities
6. Reflect critically on your own teaching practices to make sure all learners can progress according to their abilities

Over to you

Please introduce yourself in the comments below. Tell us about the place where you work. Share which topic or learning outcome in this course is most relevant to your work or interests you the most.