Essence of Learning: Addressing the learning needs of children of Syria
By Beatrice Rutishauser Ramm, Caritas Switzerland
“Our everyday life is as it is. This is normal for us!” — say a group of smiling second graders, in Damascus, Syria.
Depending on the age of these children, they have experienced many different versions of normality in the last years. Some left their homes with their parents, in order to create a new home elsewhere in Syria. Others have experienced their fathers leaving the country — leaving them, their mothers and relatives behind. Living with hunger, missing school and war have also become a part of their normality.
These children’s ever-changing environment has taught them to adapt again and again, so that they no longer even notice that they are adapting. “It is as it is” say children, teenagers and adults alike. It is normal for them that life circumstances change constantly. For the good and less for the good.
Six principles of normality
“It is as it is”, on the one hand sounds resigned but on the other hand reflects strength — to have survived until now. These children have to cope with the barriers that get in their way — like supporting their parents in their work instead of attending class- it is often not a choice, but a necessity. It is also something that makes them feel proud, because they are needed. Their ability to adapt to their ‘new normal’ is in many cases what stops these children slipping into despair, allowing them to work unconsciously on their mental resilience.
But, while these children continue to try to live their everyday lives, their changing environment, the hunger and missed school, are taking their toll.
According to child development literature, there are six basic principles of ‘normality’ that support general healthy development and the sense of ‘fitting in’ for a child. These are:
- Physical integrity (as opposed to sickness, and mental and physical disability)
- Security (rather than conflictual partnerships or social isolation)
- Social recognition (rather than lack of recognition, lack of integration and social exclusion)
- Self-development (rather than being unable to realise one’s talents)
- Performance (being neither over- nor under-challenged)
- Existential security (as opposed to poor living conditions or unemployment).[1]
These principles of normality do not exist for children in Syria. They experience the opposite of each of these principles, more or less constantly, leading to a profound impact on their general development.
Especially regarding education, these children feel overwhelmed. They suffer from learning difficulties, which are not only due to toxic stress and trauma but are the result of missing school, shift teaching and the pressure to catch up on school curricula. As a result, learning becomes in their own words, “a mountain problem”.
The children of Syria’s constantly changing normality often results in a desire to stay active and be creative. Indeed, they are experts in this, when it comes to making sure they are not hungry and can help their parents. However, often they do not have the same access to creativity when it comes to learning.
How is Caritas Switzerland’s Essence of Learning (EoL) programme supporting these children?
EoL evaluates the living situation of each child, repeating the process regularly to address the continuous changes their families are experiencing. In Syria, the EoL team discovered that 90% of the children report learning difficulties and that 90% of the children are malnourished.
1) Laying the foundations
The EoL programme makes sure that each child understands that they have many competences for learning, their circumstances simply demand a different approach. The key message to the children is not “you have a problem”, but instead helping them to understand that the problem lies with their environment. EoL helps them to understand that if their environment is challenging, it is natural that their ability to learn becomes challenging too. Most importantly, the children are helped to understand that there are ways to address these challenges
From here, EoL educators guide the children in the development of creative learning ‘helpers’, which support them to understand the subjects and build concrete learning steps. This is done through working with the children to visualize each learning step, in order to give each child a concrete orientation in the subject. For example, a child who has suffered trauma may have forgotten what certain letters look like and which way to write or read them. Through visualisation, using card cut outs of letters (or lettercards) that can be touched and felt, the child is able to reconnect with how to write the letter. Similarly with mathematics, through using bottle tops to visually signify numbers, children are able to reconnect a written number with a value. These learning helpers become useful coping strategies that the children can refer back to at any point in the learning process. After the visualisation and orientation phase the child is able to step into the next phase of the learning pathway.
2) Age-appropriate group learning
The EoL programme works with groups of children within the same developmental level, allowing the children to support each other and experience together solving learning problems in different ways. This form of grouping also ensures that the children’s thinking ability is respected and they are treated appropriately for their age. Age appropriate learning also has a positive effect on the learning speed of the group as, generally, older children learn faster, due to their already having acquired analytical thinking skills whilst younger children have only developed reflective thinking skills.
3) Building confidence, through repetition and adaptation
All the children start with easy tasks, such as simple mathematical calculations in low number ranges to reintroduce the concept of plus and minus etc., progressing on to tasks that are increasingly challenging. Repetition of the learning steps for each task allows the students to build their confidence, as they don’t focus on what they can’t do, but instead on what they can. Through this process, EoL teaches the children coping strategies for learning that they can use by themselves. The outcome is that the children feel empowered, their interest in learning increases and their relationship with learning becomes more positive again.
The Syrian context
In Syria, the EoL programme is in the early stages of implementation. It will begin by teaching the tutors how to help children who are experiencing toxic stress or traumatic experiences to regain their learning capacity at a level that corresponds with their actual age. The creative learning helpers will relieve them especially with their homework so that this particular “mountain problem” is made manageable once again.
[1] See Largo R. Das passende Leben Fischer Verlag München
