Analysis: As Irish teachers prepare to go back to work, many of their peers worldwide continue to work in unfamiliar, challenging and dangerous settings
Teachers in this part of the world are marking the countdown to a new year. Elsewhere in the world though, our teaching colleagues are working to different rhythms and in more unfamiliar and challenging settings. As we open our new planners, weigh up the merits of our timetables, look forward to meeting our students and brace ourselves for what is an all-consuming and demanding annual rhythm, this is a salute to those of us who go the extra mile for students.
We know that teachers work in prisons, hospitals and refugee camps. By contrast, they are also work in international schools, on film sets and as jet-setting tutors to rich families. They have also taught in caves and mountain-tops with hazardous ascents and in far-flung valleys.
Digital learning and distance education notwithstanding, teachers are still physically present and working in remote geographical locations. Some of these are accessible only by boat or plane and occasionally require an arduous journey across challenging terrain for pupils and staff alike.
From The Hindu, how floating schools help flooded villages in Bangladesh
Solar-powered boat schools in Bangladesh allow children affected by climate change-induced flooding to continue their education, despite environmental disruption. The floating schools dock at various locations until all the charges are aboard and seated in their internet-equipped classrooms. Some of the boats even contain mini-playgrounds, allowing the kids to play as well as learn.
Outside of the traditional classroom, other teachers educate underprivileged students on railway platforms, in India, for example, or as asylum-seeking teachers themselves, in border-located initiatives, like the Mexican 'Sidewalk School'. This school empowers children of migrant families living in ‘tent cities’ and seeking resettlement in the US to navigate their new environment with improved English-language and social skills.
Financial considerations and the technological developments of recent decades have led to the contemporary dominance of online distance learning. The enduring global model of the rural one-teacher school is virtually obsolete. Deborah Mueller is a language teacher in Australia with a 35-year career in distance learning.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Drivetime, why are some schools facing teacher shortages this September?
"Back in the day, 25 or 30 years ago, we used to send students work by mail and they'd record their speaking practice on a cassette and then we'd give feedback on the same cassette and send it back. Then we got telephones, so were able to have phone lessons. Then came video-conferencing, then Zoom, now Teams.
"I have flown to visit my students in their country towns several times since the course was introduced at my school, but it's quite expensive (plane flights, hire car, hotel overnight, food allowance), so it no longer happens."
Some teaching locations, including far-flung rural sites in the Australian outback, or the boarding schools of the Sámi in the far north of Sweden and refugee camps, amongst others, require a deliberate, critical, pedagogical approach. The students’ physical and social environment is centred in a culturally-responsive way. Indigenous teachers and learners, for instance, value the inclusion of outdoor learning, and of storytelling.
From ABC Australia, Gazan children are learning in makeshift classrooms after their schools were destroyed in Israeli attacks
These are techniques which modify a universalizing curriculum through acknowledgement of local cultural and seasonal practices and attitudes to the surrounding natural environment. Irish educators are also keen to implement this kind of education.
Increasingly, governments and NGOs are endeavouring to recruit and better qualify indigenous and local teachers, whose linguistic ability and cultural insight better place them to engage with the pupils and locations in which they work. But this policy approach runs parallel to a powerfully ascendant managerialist approach to education worldwide.
The relative geographic isolation in which some of the teachers work, though, can also afford them a liberating autonomy from the relatively inflexible, performance-driven orientation of more 'mainstream' schools and allow them to draw on their own experience and judgement to include and validate local forms of knowledge.
READ: School in a war zone: how war has destroyed Gaza's classrooms
Teachers in refugee camps in Sudan, Kenya, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Gaza and elsewhere are often themselves displaced and may face daily threats of violence. Accessing school buildings, if they haven’t been destroyed, can involve a perilous journey. Online education is not always possible either, as electricity, internet and device supply may be limited. UNRWA’s 450 Temporary Learning Spaces in Gaza have delivered education and offered recreational activities to thousands of Gazan children, in addition to its provision of psychosocial support to traumatised adults and children.
In something of a new horizons flex, some teachers have even gone extra-terrestrial, including those former teachers re-trained as astronaut-educators. Other teachers are specialising as STEM space educators, refining their knowledge through sub-orbital flights and the study of astronautics.
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
