Innovating Higher Education for Refugee Learners
Sadiki is a recent college graduate, an intern at a tech startup, and one of over 21 million refugees currently displaced worldwide. Recently he gave a tour of the refugee camp that has been his home for the last twenty years and reflected on his educational journey. As the group passed a large, shady […]
Making Early Education a Priority for Refugee Children
The United Nations calls the Syrian refugee crisis the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. Within this context, one problem is front and center: the lost generation of children, forced from their homes by war, their lives and hopes blighted by trauma and destruction, their basic right to education unfulfilled. And we know that […]
Want to Build a Vibrant Democracy? Start by Being an Active Citizen
We live in a world where we have a greater sense of interconnectedness than ever before due to access to social networks, the ever-present media and the larger awareness of the events that are happening in remote areas of the earth where we did not have access previously. Due to this inflow of information, we […]
How Can We Prepare Refugee Children for Uncertainty?
As a country, the size of problems within India often mars our perspective on issues that are changing global dynamics. This dawned on me after spending two weeks in Greece learning about the global forced migration and refugee crisis as a part of the WISE’s Learner’s Voice Program. They were the two most intense […]
Nurturing Critical Thinkers in a Post-Truth World
Social change is a nebulous and frightening topic. What is it exactly? Who is in charge of deciding the objectives for change? How is social change measured? Does society need to change? What role do educators play in determining what exact change should and will take place in our classrooms and in the world? None […]
How Technology Could (and Could Not) Extend Access
Editor’s note: This article is part of a series on how to combat inequalities in participation in higher education. The scale of the challenges where extending access to higher education is concerned looks overwhelming. In sub-Saharan Africa for example, the current higher education enrolment ratio for is 8% but the goal is to increase participation to […]
How Artificial Intelligence Can Save Schools and Parents Money
Most math education in the United States doesn’t add up. A recent survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked the country 41st in the world for primary school math. Instead of improving its performance since 2003, America’s students actually delivered poorer marks. As the world becomes more and more dependent on technology, […]
Refugee Education: Teaching a Kid to be a Kid Again
Mahmoud faced the sea again. It was only 3 months after he arrived to the island of Lesvos in Greece, near the border with Turkey. “We were 60 people on a boat, we were on the sea for 4 hours and the engine came to an abrupt halt. We thought that was the end […]
Entrepreneurship and Education: Q&A with Badr Jafar
Badr Jafar on the role of social enterprise in addressing socio-economic challenges, and why education must change. • Briefly describe your journey as a social entrepreneur. Born in Sharjah into a family business, I had a very early education on the general nuances of doing business. The social impact element was something I picked up […]
A Lean Startup Approach to Education Development
Millions of Syrian refugee children today lack access to a quality education, leaving them at risk of becoming a lost generation. Unfortunately this is not where the problem ends, but begins. Due to challenges ranging from inequality to poverty to civil war, there are roughly one billion children around the world who don’t receive a […]