Attachments
Executive Summary
There are 75 million school-aged children living in countries affected by conflict (Nicolai, 2016). More than 12 million children are refugees residing outside of their country of origin, most in neighboring countries that struggle to meet the educational needs of their own citizens (UNHCR, 2019a; Mendenhall, Russell, & Buckner, 2017). In low resource, crisis, and conflictaffected contexts, education can serve as a protective factor, supporting the cognitive, social, and emotional development of affected children (Nicolai & Triplehorn, 2003; UNHCR, 2017; Kirk & Winthrop, 2013). Teachers play an instrumental role in ensuring their classrooms are safe and secure environments that promote this development (Mendenhall, 2017; Riggs & Davidson, 2016; Shriberg, 2007; Dryden-Peterson, 2011). However, in order to do so, teachers must be well themselves.
Teaching is one of the most stressful professions (Greenberg, Brown, & Abenavoli, 2016).
This stress is amplified in crisis and conflict-affected contexts where teachers often work without professional development support, certification, or compensation (Mendenhall, Gomez, & Varni, 2018; Burns & Lawrie, 2015). Rhoda , a Ugandan refugee who lives in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya recognizes the connection between teachers’ stress levels and the well-being and learning outcomes of students: “I came to realize the well-being of a teacher to learner is very important in the process of learning because when the teacher is not well, that will affect the learners in the class...Both the teacher and the learner, they should be well in health-wise, mentally, emotionally and physically because if one of them is affected, then the learning will not take place in the school.” While literature from stable contexts supports Rhoda’s assertion (see e.g. Jones, Bouffard, & Weissbourd, 2013; McCallum et al., 2017), there is little evidence on and attention paid to the well-being of teachers in crisis and conflict-affected contexts. It is imperative to address this dearth of evidence because teacher well-being can directly impact student learning and have serious implications for equity across school systems.
This landscape review, which was commissioned by the Education Equity Research Initiative, serves as a first step in filling the evidence gap by building an understanding of teacher well-being in low resource, crisis, and conflict-affected contexts and identifying the individual and contextual factors that may influence well-being. Organized into five sections, the landscape review introduces the importance of better understanding teacher well-being in low resource, crisis, and conflict-affected contexts; outlines the methodology for this report; presents a conceptual framework for teacher well-being informed by the existing literature and evidence on teacher well-being as well as interviews with teachers working in displacement and low resource settings; describes the existing research and evidence base on teacher well-being; and concludes by presenting a Key Actions Matrix with programmatic and policy guidance for supporting teacher well-being.