Refugee Girls Need Our Attention — Not Just on World Refugee Day, But Every Day
Being a refugee is not a label that one would wish to have. Despite the 44 years that have gone by and the acquisition of Canadian citizenship, I never forget that I am indeed, a refugee. Today we recognise World Refugee Day. But for more than 65 million refugees — over half of whom […]
Refugee Children Empowered by Technology to Learn
June 20 marks World Refugee Day, a day when we recognize the tragic impact that war, persecution, conflicts, and natural disasters have had on millions – causing them to flee their homes. Today, nearly half of the world’s refugees are children and some of the most vulnerable are the more than three million Syrian children who have […]
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 […]
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 […]
Four Points to Consider Before Leveraging Technology for Equity
In one of my blog articles I wrote about research and tech in Kenya and if we are doing enough of both. Equally, another article asked the question: University-based research inspired Google – is research needed to inspire Kenyan innovators too? If these two articles are to go by then there is a real concern over the quality […]
The Changing Ends and Paradigm for Education in the World
EVEN THE MOST TRADITIONAL among us understand that the world is changing rapidly. Today, our most important educational question is “How do we adapt our children’s education to these exponential and ongoing changes?” Many already realize that the education we give our young people no longer prepares them to thrive in the future. But although reformers […]