Think Creative Spring 2024

resuming learning, fostering healing

“If you want to work with teachers in integrat ing social-emotional learning, the teachers themselves should be aware of their emotions, of their own trauma,” Nasser says. “And to be role models for children in terms of showing, ‘We all went through this trauma, but we’ll go through it, and we’ll be OK.’” School directors said the training had led them to adopt a stronger emphasis on students’ wellbeing and given them new skills to support it. Parents said the self-care techniques they learned in the project’s awareness workshops helped them heal from trauma and better support their children’s learning. “Crisis offers an opportunity to reset how things had been done habitually,” says Kevin Nascimento, Senior Technical Advisor in Edu cation for Development at Creative. “It allows us to say, let’s bring in this focus on healing trauma in addition to the academics.” A project transformed The READ II project was able to help schools and communities recover from conflict only after an extraordinary transformation.

Students walk to their class at Addis Fana elementary school in Dessie, Ethiopia.

Adapting to coronavirus school closures in spring 2020 would be only one of many major changes for the project. The pandemic coincided with changes in USAID’s strategy that reduced READ II’s remaining budget and changed priorities. That necessitated the closure of some important activities and the termination of partnerships with some co-implementers. In November 2020, armed conflict erupted

between rebels and national forces in Ethiopia’s Tigray Region, spreading into the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar in mid-2021. Schools closed as families fled to camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). USAID instructed READ II to scale down from seven regions to only the three affected by the conflict, to equip temporary learning centers and conflict-affected schools and provide psychosocial services. Initially, the on-the-ground team’s mission was to improve literacy. Now, it was being called upon to implement a project in education in emergencies—as soon as possible. However, the team had strengths that would help them pivot. Having implemented education projects in crisis contexts in 13 countries in the prior decade, Creative was experienced in rapidly assessing conflict-affected communities’ needs and designing holistic responses. Creative’s home office provided technical assistance in needs assessment, referral systems and a train ing curriculum for psychosocial support and social-emotional learning. Implementing partner World Vision provided international experts to train the project team virtually in the psychological first aid and social care they would impart in the new training programs.

Temporary learning centers supported 1,324 students – including nearly 500 out-of-school children – during and after the conflict.

If you want to work with teachers in integrating social-emotional learning, the teachers themselves should be aware of their emotions, of their own trauma.” - Ilham Nasser, Ph.D., Creative Senior Technical Advisor in Education for Development “

The project launched in 2018 as Reading for Ethiopia’s Achievement Developed II, part of a series of USAID-funded early-grade literacy projects. With the original READ II program initially focused on improving reading in seven regions, it also built the capacity of eight local organizations, more than 27,000 teachers, 6,000 school leaders and more than 11,000 community volunteer literacy leaders to organize supple mental reading opportunities.

18 | Think Creative | Spring 2024