A project led by Indiana University’s Center for the Study of Global Change and the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies has been helping teachers across the U.S. and globally who work with displaced learners so they can better support their students and meet their educational needs.
Teachers Supporting Teachers is an online community of practice that connects Grade 4 through 10 teachers so they can share, learn and discuss best practices for supporting displaced students
“There has been a recent rise in the number of students who have experienced forced displacement, and by extension teachers who are in need of strategies to support such students,” said Daniel Shephard, a research affiliate with the Center for the Study of Global Change who is spearheading the project.
Indiana hosted nearly 30,000 refugees in 2022, and there were over 37 million refugees globally and nearly 76 million internally displaced people at the end of 2023, with children and youths over-represented in these groups, Shephard said.
A similar project was conducted by Elisheva Cohen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in which teachers across countries shared experiences of teaching in crisis contexts. Shephard said there was strong demand to continue such work.
The focus on teachers in Grades 4 through 10 is intentional.
“These grades represent key transitional moments in learners’ lives as they move from childhood to adolescence and from basic education to secondary education,” Shephard said. “It is at these transition points that learners are most at risk of beginning to disengage from education.”
The Hamilton Lugar School’s Title VI National Resource Centers used their personal and professional networks to recruit teachers from Indiana, across the U.S. and globally who work with displaced learners. Teachers from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Ireland, Jordan, Lebanon, Uganda, Ukraine and the U.S. participated.
The project involved monthly 90-minute Zoom meetings from Feb. 24 through Aug. 3, a chance for feedback and reflection between sessions, and a WhatsApp group for teachers to interact. Some of the teachers collaborated to make presentations on topics such as multilingual classrooms and psychosocial support for learners.
“The goal was to bring teachers from different countries together to learn from each other’s strategies for supporting their students with displacement backgrounds and secondly to facilitate learning about different displacement contexts, including some contexts teachers’ own students might have come from,” Shephard said.
Benefit to teachers
Olivia Scott, an English language learners teacher at Perry Meridian High School in Indianapolis, and Moses Abigaba, an English and social studies teacher at Maratatu Primary School in Uganda, both have students who are from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Scott said more refugee families are settling in her school’s district, and the past school year she had three students whose families are from Congo, although the students grew up in Tanzania.
“I wanted to participate because I wanted to learn strategies on how to help my students who are from DR Congo as well as Syria,” Scott said. “I speak Spanish, and most of my students can communicate with me, but I don’t want to leave my non-Spanish-speaking students out when planning lessons.”
The project gave Scott the idea for her students to create a slide presentation about the traditions of their countries so they could learn similarities. She’s also made sure to check on students’ mental health, and she shared project information with colleagues so they can apply ideas.
He said the project taught him how to better accompany learners on their education journey.
“I will ensure that all learners are loved equally so that they can be free to share their own experiences and challenges, and I will support my learners individually to help identify their potential,” Abigaba said.
Sana Jabarkhail, an English teacher at Jahan Private High School in Kabul, Afghanistan, and Stephanie Middleton, who teaches multilingual learners at Templeton Elementary School in Landover, Maryland, both work with displaced students from Afghanistan.
Jabarkhail said it is tough teaching in Afghanistan, where continued conflict has taken a mental toll on students, and motivating them can be a challenge. She said that connecting with other teachers facing similar challenges gave her hope for still being able to reach goals with her students.
“It was such a good experience,” Jabarkhail said. “I have learned new methods, and I will use those methods for my students. I learned a lot from different teachers; I learned from their experiences and opinions, which was really effective.”
Middleton said her students from Afghanistan have had to leave family and friends behind, or lost friends or family members to violence, and had their schooling disrupted. She said she learned that many of the activities the other teachers use in the classroom focus on social-emotional learning, so the trauma their students have experienced can be addressed first before focusing on learning.
“As a result of this program, I will spend more time looking at the circumstances my students are dealing with — family makeup, the social climate in Afghanistan, the support system in place or lack of support system — and helping to ensure that I can mitigate those circumstances as much as I possibly can so that students’ hearts and minds are freed up for educational pursuits,” Middleton said.
Measures of success
Shephard said that although long-term research would be needed to determine the project’s impact, there are some initial indicators that it has been successful:
- Teachers reported gaining a better understanding of the types of contexts their learners have experienced.
- Teachers were encouraged by hearing that their struggles, motivations and successes are shared by teachers across the world.
- Several teachers have committed to implementing some of the classroom strategies that their colleagues had shared. This is happening both within and between countries.
- In the WhatsApp group, teachers are continuing to share materials and encouraging each other to use technology to translate them for use across different contexts.
Because of the success, Teachers Supporting Teachers won’t be a one-time project.
“Although the exact parameters are still being determined, we plan to continue this project in the future,” said Elizabeth Konwest, director of the Center for the Study of Global Change, which has been designated a National Resource Center for global studies. “The global and area studies centers at IU are committing to supporting teachers in Indiana, across the U.S. and around the world.”
