Open Education as Resilience:Sumud and Higher Education in Palestine

Welcome everyone. We are so glad that you could join us today for open education as resilience sim and higher education in Palestine. Uh we are we are very excited uh to to be here today with our speakers and we will have them introduce themselves shortly. Um my name is Heather Blicker and I'm the director of the community college consortium for OEER which is a part of open education global and some of you may know me because um I work primarily in North America and we can um share more information about about CCCOER and OA global um later on. Um, and if my colleague is able to post uh links in the chat to our websites, that would be wonderful. But I'd also like my colleague Paula to introduce herself. >> Thank you, Ed. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are located now. Uh, my name is Paula Corti and I am based in Italy. uh very hot Italy today and uh um I work as a senior open education expert for Spark Europe mainly with European uh librarians uh who are members of the European network of open education librarians and I'm very happy to have IDA insider together with us today because it's going to be a very interesting learning experience for me first. So I'm happy for anyone who is joining but uh I'm also grateful myself for this opportunity. So let's start with a great thank you. >> Yes completely agree a big thank you to our speakers and today's conversation focuses on education in emergency affected contexts through an academic and a professional lens. So, it's not intended to be a political forum or a space for real-time commentary um on the events that are happening. Although we know that um many people are very concerned and caring about what is happening um in this space today. Our shared goal is to better understand learning loss, uh, teacher preparation and continuity of higher education. Um, and to also consider how open education communities can offer meaningful support. And, uh, you know, in in planning for this webinar, we've been discussing for many months, we want our presenters, um, to feel safe and to have agency, and they are central to how this session was designed. So questions have been submitted in advance um when you registered and we have gone through them and made sure that the speakers feel comfortable answering them and so we will have a presentation um and then we will have a question section and it's um not going to be like your usual Q&A um but we will go through and ask the questions for you PA and I um we ask everyone to respect the boundaries that have been intent entionally set and this really is an act of care for our presenters. Um we're not engaging in this work as a theoretical deep dive today although we will be sharing references later um so that you can explore this even further. Um but we are offering this as a grounding lens. One that helps us think about higher education, learning loss and continuity not as some abstract challenge but as lived realities shaped by context, agency and care. And um if we go to the next slide, I'd like to welcome our speakers and to thank our speakers and ask um each of our speakers to introduce themselves and give us you know um your location and your title and just a little bit of background about yourself uh before we dive into the presentation. Uh yes, thank you Heather for Yeah, thank you Heather for your introduction and thank you for all our um guests here that they give uh us their time to listen to the presentation and to know more about uh Bistine and what is uh going on and the reality of education in Palestine. So we are where we where are we? We are in Badistine. It is in the eastern Mediterranean region in the Middle East and it contains both Gaza and the West Bank. The historical Palestine is larger but now we are talking about these two areas. Uh I am a Bakir from Akosov University. I have been a faculty member in the educational faculty of educational sciences for more than 28 years and I served as the dean of the faculty for more than two years also. Uh for me from my own experience education is not only a service education is a lif line for people and societies during crisis here in Palestine because of the reality of the context that we are going me and Dr. Sa that we are going to illustrate and explain during this webinar. Thank you. Thank you Heather and Baba for giving us the opportunity to participate in this uh webinar so we can uh uh send our voices to uh people in every way. Thank you. I'm um I am from Palestine. Uh thank you Heather Paola and Liz for organizing this. U for me um I would like to introduce myself as somebody who has lived all her life under crisis and uh through my life I have learned what does it mean to live in crisis and what does education mean? I did not learn about education in emergency just in my PhD but I learned about it through my journey while I'm learning and struggling to learn uh in my educational journey. Uh I'm a professor of education in emergency and online learning and uh I'm a leader I have got the award of leader in open education. Um I'm so honored to be here and to see many people of our friends in this seminar and I hope uh I would like to shed some light on Palestine. I don't look at Palestine as a space or an area or a country. I look at it as a vision for libration. Thank you for this opportunity. >> Okay. Okay. And I think I think now we can we can move forward into our our first slide. Thank you. Thank you both for introducing yourself. >> Thank you. >> Uh yes, thank you. Now we start with the presentation and here we have to talk about the aim of this presentation. Our aim is to shed light on the context and reality of uh education in Palestine. We are not talking about a crisis that happened once or an emergency case but we are talking about a prolonged uh situation where people face every day the same uh difficulties and challenges to access education and uh here we are talking about disruption destruction uh movement restriction and all things that you can imagine imagine that uh um can stop our uh students from continuing their education uh normally and uh we have here quotes that SA can uh elaborate on from our students and from their parents also uh to focus on uh what people face every day when they want to access education. Uh it's not normal to uh have continuity. uh it is abnormal here in Palestine and uh we have so many periods that where uh education either stopped completely as said when we were students I stopped from learning for two years the uh closure of the university where I was studying closed for two years so it was uh completely uh stopped and sometimes it is distracted. Uh so SA if you can elaborate. Yes. >> Uh here I'm going to reflect on quotation. I took it from one of my research. Uh that uh one of the mothers she said that the only thing I took with me from home was my children's school textbooks when we were forced to leave. Uh this woman is from Gaza. She has many children and uh the only thing she cared about is her uh children textbooks. And if you look here, if we go to the uh literature, we can see that at that moment of displacement and uh people look at safety, people look at uh documents for identity, people look at um their uh owning things. But here in Palestine in Gaza, people look at textbooks at their school bags. They the only thing they take with them is that and uh this is u also with the next uh quotation that say I need to continue my studies my education is the only hope. This is also from uh one of uh uh a higher education student that he say I do everything to continue uh my education. Here we can see that there is a new uh vision of education. We are not talking about academic uh vision of education. We are talking about an a new vision that education is for life. So in time of emergency we are concentrating on safety. We are concentrating on food. We are concentrating in all the theoretical part of emergency education. But here in Gaza, a lesson comes from Palestine say that safety and blast education means future means hope. So I we love to start with something from the field. So because education is human. Thank you. Please can you move to next slide? Why does the this conversation matter? It is very important for us as educator educators to shed light on the context and the crisis here in Palestine because it means resilience and summud in our language means steadfastness. Uh so when we look at education it means dignity preservation it means also uh um uh identity and being on the ground. So it mean it it is not only a matter of transferring knowledge and skills to our students. But when we talk about education, this conversation is very important because we want to illustrate how education support people and uh give them hope to build their futures. uh we know that the Palestinians are suffering so many challenges nowadays and uh they lack most of the uh human rights. So when we talk about uh education, we talk about uh empowering our students, empowering educators themselves, the parents, the community with hope to build their futures. uh so it is important for us to talk about open education Dr. Sida uh can shed light uh on the importance of resilience and what is meant by resilience for us as educators. Yes. We are what we are trying to do today is to connect uh the terminologies of uh resilience or sumu sum and sum crisis uh open education as a collective action coming from the ground. So we are trying to present a new meaning of these terminology by connecting them from the life of the educators, the teachers, the scholars under crisis in Gaza. This is why this conversation matter. Next please Paula. The case of Bistine. Palestine was known for the highest rates uh of literacy in the region before 1948. In 1948 after the occupation uh also Biststein was one of the highest or contained one of the highest uh records for uh literacy in the region. uh but uh I think that nowadays we uh need people to value more what is happening in Palestine to continue education. Uh we know that the Palestinians themselves uh value education. We we look at education as a means of dignity and uh identity and we we want other people from all over the world to be uh uh advocate uh for peace, justice and dignity. Uh so we won't be able to support us. We want people to have uh a better understanding of what is happening in Palestine because education means a lot to us. And mean when we are talking about higher education, we are talking about adults who can and adult sons who can build their futures to meet the need of the labor market. Uh so if you have a look at the image here, you will see the reality of people. So how can we connect uh uh hope with uh sum with education for these people? So it means a lot to the Palestinians to uh value education to be able to look for the future as something to uh build hope on. So, Sidam uh also can talk about the uh Palestinian people and how they advocate peace, justice and unity through education also. Yes. >> Yeah. Thank you. on on reality. Uh we think of education as um a link to libration as a link to raise our voices as humans and at the same time through education like today we are coming to tell our story. Without our education without being educated we are not able to tell our stories. So education for us is is not the degrees, it is not the certificates, is not just the knowledge, it's also the meanings of why we are educated, why we want to be educated because we want to raise our voices. We want to connect to people like you in order to learn from you and also to listen to our stories from our perspective as people who are living under crisis. So we believe that open education could be a real tool for connection with people around the world and we believe in peace in justice and dignity but together not separated. Paula next please. Whenever we are talking about Gaza and the West Bank, we are talking about um disruption and uh completely closure of our institutions in Gaza. Uh for example when we talk about the infrastructure about the buildings about uh uh human capital we are talking about uh destruction complete destruction and we are talking also about some psychological um uh stress that people uh have there either on the level of the students the educators the family and the community in general. uh this also affects uh our students motivation even in the other slides and when we review other papers we find that despite all the difficult circumstances we are talking here about uh motivated students to build their futures and to continue their education. uh but what we noticed during the last three years we noticed that we have a high rates of learning loss and our students reach uh educational higher education institutions unprepared for this level. Uh so we have learning loss and we have uh read readiness gaps. Uh what we aim uh nowadays is to find initiatives to bridge these uh gaps and to try to put our students on the right track uh to be able to continue uh with uh uh multi- uh uh skills on the communication level on the uh their disciplines on and in the international also relations. Uh so we are looking for uh uh educational recovery and we are also uh looking for long-term student success. We are not talking here about only uh short-term success for our students but what we aim uh for is long-term uh student success. Uh so say do you think that sumud can help us here and what kind of sumud is needed? What kind of resilience is needed for our educational institutions to enable our institutions to recover and to enable our students to recover and to fill the gaps between what what the reality is and what is expected from them for the labor market due to long years of occupation and latest educa and uh a lot of uh problems engineering tool career from Jerusalem the uh and uh the learning loss percentage is very high. It's 100% in Gaza, 70% in some uh refugee camps and between 50 and 70% and this is a research I have done for UNESCO 2024. uh uh but still we are talking about learning loss for the formal education from a theoretical meaning of what does learning loss mean which is has been developed the meaning and the concepts in a place that is out crisis and maybe like in COVID 19 it was used when we are talking about health issue but here in Gaza in Gene in Tulare we are talking about different approach of learning loss like to explain more when I'm talking about learning loss if I'm if I want to count the days that children went to schools and youth went to university yes there is a high percentage of learning loss but if I want to talk about what type of learning do children youth scholars and teachers have learned learn through the last years. I will tell you there was no learning loss because there is a different type of learning that happened that is related to how I live, how I discover, how I connect, how I survive, how I protect myself and protect my family, how I find a different way to continue my learning. like the concept of learning spaces. You know that there are more than 650 learning spaces in Gaza and there are more than 30 in Janine for the uh Janine camp and also in Tulkarim. These concepts have been created in Gazda. We don't need them. I'm not trying to make it uh something good but I'm trying to show that maybe there's a new kind of learning that is happening and the world need to learn more about the best practice education in emergency that is uh due to sumud due to resilience due to the insist of people on the existence despite of all the death around them. Despite of all the destroy, all the universities, all the schools have been destroyed. But despite that, we decide to continue our learning and we decide to rephrase the term of learning loss and readiness gaps. I know as an educator that motivation is the most important uh factor for education. But when we are talking about people under war, under genocide, under idiocide, people we think that people will lose their readiness for learning. But Gazda has proved the the opposite at all because people they are still motivated to learn and they find different ways to do that. Please ba can you go to next? >> But I want to add something sam if you allow me. uh whenever we are talking about the learning loss, we are talking about our students unable or unprepared for creative writing for example for research for critical thinking and uh reasoning. Uh so our u our aim here sa is to enable our students despite the gains that they get uh from the crisis that that they are living you know to cover the or to bridge the gaps to enable them to uh be able to participate as citizens in the labor market. uh and uh this is very important also for us to shed light on. Uh despite all the losses that our students have, they have gained a lot but still we need to enable them to participate effectively uh in the labor market and this is very important also for us to uh uh recover uh when we are talking about uh education here in Palestine. Thank you. Yes. So education is as stated through uh UNESCO and all UN uh organization that it's a human right yes of course it's a human right but when it is violated who is trying to keep this human right who is trying to keep it for Palestinian children or for other children or for other youth around the world who are suffering from crisis. So here we want to talk about education as a way to protect dignity. Education it's to raise and to like every time I go around to speak I keep saying I'm I'm a Palestinian. I'm from Palestine. I'm from Palestine. I see many people who don't mention their identity. This is because the identity of the Palestinian is not recognized. And this is why these children they need to say all the time you if you look at them they are working without any kind of uh good environment. They are intense. They are in the street. They are under uh very bad circumstances and condition but still they want to re to learn and they want to take their right uh their human right for education. This is because we all as a Palestinian believe that this is the only path for us for the future. This is education is digging a new way for a better life for us. Not only on theoretical but it is really I have witnessed that I have lived in that myself and the also my children and I hope my grandchildren will not trying to take their children their right in this way. So education keeps future possibility alive. We don't know if there's a future or not because we can't guarantee that these children will still alive for tomorrow in Gaza. >> Yes, we have uncertaintity here in Palestine. Education is always with an uncertainity in Palestine. And if you will see the environment here uh you see that these students have the right to sit on a chair and to have a desk to write on. But still they are writing their assignments on the bricks. So uh uh nothing nothing is guaranteed here in Palestine. But we we hope as you said Dr. Sa we hope our our uh grandchildren will have better opportunities than our children or our uh or the chances that we have and the opportunities that we had in the past. Uh so human right is for everyone. Equity and equality should be for every uh nation in the world and this is what we are trying to say. We raise our voices to say that as all human beings in the world we have a human rights here and education is the the uh most important for us here in Palestine because it is the only investment. We don't have any kind of other investment uh that we can uh depend on except uh our children's education. Yes. >> Thank you. Next please. So if we are talking BA next please. So we are here talking beyond knowledge transmission. It's not about syllabus. It's not about textbooks. It's about the meaning of education. It's about the goal of open education. Why? What is the context? How it is related to the uh situation. So it is more we are talking here more about cultural and social concepts more than a well-ritten syllabus or a well organized formal education. Here we are talking about keeping community, youth, children, scholars and teachers intellectually, emotionally and socially alive. So we are talking about a new concept of why education is more than knowledge transmission. So higher education and obeducation should we need to think about it in a different way when we are talking about education in crisis settings and each crisis is different from the other. So we need to adapt it in a different way. So I I would like to raise this issue for all the participants that we need not to think only about the standards that suits everybody. No, the standards does not suit everybody. The standards is just an umbrella and then we need to adapt. We need to think of open education as an umbrella. But we need to look at the culture and social and political situation as a community of act and uh the behavior of the people. I I have been I have been working with u to sustain education Gaza for the last three years. uh and I have learned more than I have learned in all my life just from the children why they want to learn from the educators how did they survive and how they stand every day and go to the tent to teach their students in Islamic university in Alazar University in a low condition with low internet or even without electricity and still every day they start as it is the first day of the university they they teach us the power of existence the power of life why do we exist so here I think there's a knowledge transformation about how people in crisis who change the meaning of life the meaning of education and also the word smooth when we are talking about it a little bit more now when Paola move to next slide. Thanks for >> Yes. But I want to add something sa I want to say that whenever we are talking about rebuilding our universities and when we want to redesign uh education here in Palestine, we have to keep in mind as you said our students experiences. We are not going to deal uh or to design the same context the same uh educational system for all areas here in Palestine in Gaza and the West Bank. But it depends on the experiences of our uh we we will depend when designing our future universities and our future curricula depending on the area and the experiences of our students. And this is very important as we said it is not a standards. It is an umbrella where everyone can participate based on the experiences and the uh circumstances that that educators and the students live and mainly here we are talking about the students. they should be the focus of our uh intention and we accordingly we can plan something for them to uh provide them with what they need their needs are very important for us. So uh we when we talk about rebuilding institutions we are talking about students themselves and their experiences. So when we are talking about resilience we are usually talking during uncertainity we are talking about from the definition we say that resilience it means trying to return to normal but here when you are under long long years of occupation and maybe it will continue more and more what does normal mean? So we need to change the terminology of moving to normal, return to normal because we don't know what does normal mean, how it looks since it is the crisis is continuous. What we need to talk about is innovation in sustaining education. We need to talk about educational continuity not the same as before the crisis and not to talk about reconstruction because the crisis is still going. So here there is a dilemma of how to go back to normality, how to reconstruct education and how while the crisis is still there here there is a kind of innovation that I think need to be documented because when people under crisis try to find different scenarios, different pathies, different ways in order to continue their education like some people use online offline learning some people are using learning spaces intense some people are using some application some people are using WhatsApp and telegram using some kind of technology some people are just listening learning through uh discovery and finding some people are they are in the shelters in onroa schools they are doing a new version of schools a classrooms inside some universities are moving o online while there is no internet. What does online mean while there is no internet? But we find the solution because we are using low bandwidth and we are talking about uh some um hosting from other people around the world. So educational recovery begins from people not begins from standards or rules or uh from formal or authority. It begins from people in a crisis with from relationships, from a collaboration. And the most important thing that many people ignore and we need open education here to have a better role in that is the well-being of the people, the well-being of the children, the well-being of the scholars, the well-being of the youth and learners at universities because we believe that uh we be I think everybody in Palestine is traumatized even me and I but we all the time ignore it and we all the time deny it because we have not learned how to acknowledge it and deal with it. So I think here there is uh we can raise that we need more of open educational resources about uh first aid support psychological first aid about a trauma informed bidology how to train uh scholars to deal with their trauma and to teach a traumat traumatized students because we can't just say okay come to class and things is fine and I know some of the people here they have uh being uh volunteers with us at uh to teach gaza students and uh when we did some uh awareness about the trauma informed pedogology some of them were surprised about okay where can we train so I would like to emphasize here that recovery needs innovative solution solutions and innovative ways in order to keep uh educational sustain or to sustain education. I do you like to reflect on that? Uh yes, I want to add something which is very important that we shouldn't deal with our students as receivers of knowledge only. When we deal with our students, we deal with them as human beings. We should pay attention to their welfare, to their psychological stress and also and mental health and to the experiences that they have they have or they had in the past because what they are experiencing is something that exceeds what uh we can imagine sometimes. So we cannot tell uh the student to separate his emotions, his social life from being a student and we to ask students to be uh disciplined and to uh be good achievers uh in school. So we have to pay attention to all what we what you mentioned SA and uh to to help them to recover and to be able after that to acquire knowledge and to feel that they are uh normal students who who should develop their skills to work in the labor market. But unless we do this uh knowledge will remain separated from their lives. And this is very important for our decision makers to pay attention to and to uh uh give training courses uh for our educators to enable our students to u be good uh receivers of knowledge. And at the same time whenever we are talking talking about uh education and pedigogy we should involve something uh which is concerned with uh trauma informed and uh education. So we have to to make our students first be feel relaxed and after that to provide them with the uh skills and knowledge they need for their lives and for building their futures. Yes. >> Can we go to next slide please? So uh the most recent trend now that is to using technology for education in a crisis and uh there is a lot of literature about that and I believe myself in that but at the same time technology in itself is not enough since technology is uh controlled and during a crisis when it's controlled Then there will be no electricity, there will be no internet. And then we need to find another re we need to reimagine education in a different way that not the controlled items is uh the ones that will control the right to education. So any solution should be flexible should related to uh relationships. I choose to me and choose to use this photo. This photo has um it's uh when people were asked to go when people decided to go back to North Gaza and 300,000 people decide to go back together which is very important and they are carrying their children their parents on their shoulders for a long time. They decided to go back and if you can see the photo alongside the sea but at the same time they know that they will not find all their houses are destroyed. All the universities are destroyed in North Gaza. Everything is destroyed. They will find nothing there. But through my interviews with some of them I said I was asking them why you are going and they said no there is a lot all our lives are there our memories are there we are going there to smell our the our lives to smell our children who are under the ground who were killed. We are going there to sit on the ground of our previous houses because the memories are there. I think this is the kind of education that we have learned from them. The nobody of them asked the other if you want to go back or not. They all collectively decide to go back and they So here the meaning of resilience is related to the meaning of education. Why do you learn? I know that uh maybe there's uh we need uh more time so we can maybe now move a bit quicker in order to move to the definition of >> Yes. But I want to emphasize something s here uh for our viewers and listeners. If you see this picture you will decide the size of crisis that we have. All these people are returning and come going back to their homes. Uh where is education? Where where can you imagine education between these people? We have children here. We have uh youth, we have adult sons and so it is very difficult to find a place for all these people uh to provide them with the skills they need for to build their future. if they could cannot find a place to or a shelter for them to protect them from the environment at at least. Uh so this is very important when we talk about innovation here we are talking about relationships relationships between students themselves. From the survey that I have conducted lately students said that they learn from each other a lot. uh relationships between educators. We share knowledge and information between institutions for for example university allowed students to join from other universities in Gaza because they couldn't couldn't access education. So uh because we have platforms here in the West Bank, we could reach our students and other students in Gaza uh uh through our platforms and they continue their education using uh our platforms relationships between decision makers, relationships between scholars and institutions uh in different areas in the world all over the world. We have partners. We have partnership is very important for us. We can share experiences. We can share uh sometimes uh our colleagues from other institutions uh delivered online courses for our students. And it is very important for us to have initiatives to overcome this crisis and to to uh uh make education uh of higher standards than it is now. And you can imagine the the picture itself, the image itself talks. You can imagine what is needed for all these people if they have no place to return to. So they are going back but for nothing. Their homes are destroyed. Uh their institutions are completely destructed. So it is important for everyone to take the responsibility of uh establishing a new future for the this generation. Yes sir. Next please. I think here there is a lot of lessons to be learned from uh education in Palestine especially in the last three years and uh uh the idea of using open education as a tool for resilience. How we did use it for higher education. how we connect learning to real contexts and not just implementing theoretical u theories that could be suit for other contexts maybe not suit for ballistine. So when we move to online learning and we between West Bank and Gaza uh different university we decide to uh implement to open the other universities to univers students from Gaza. So we thought that online learning will be the solution and then we found that there was no internet. Of course there was no internet. So we try to use >> electricity >> and no electricity. Yes. at the beginning for a long time and then we thought of merging between three main concepts in order to produce a new frame a new model of summood of of resilience of educational which is using online learning with offline learning and trauma informed teaching. I mean by this that we need just the students and the scholars to be online for maybe one minute and then they can move to offline mode. At the same time we were aware about the well-being of the students and the scholars themselves and we used the trauma informed teaching but people were not aware about it. So we need to do uh professional development and this was um not easy to be conducted because I remember in many times while I was conducting the uh trauma informed uh pedagogy sessions I um I was me myself traumatized because I was not able to to listen to the whole painful stories of them but at the same time I taught myself and I taught them how to deal with that in order to be able to deal with your students who are traumatized. So what we want to talk here about how we learned from ballist from Gaza especially that there's the human ability to transform the meaning of death into life and here are the meaning of destruction of higher education institutions as infrastructure and building and despite that they are alive the university in Gaza are alive they did not been they have been destroyed as uh infra structure as canvases but the spirit the vision and the continuity did not have not been uh destroyed. So destruction has moved to be a kind of meaning of continuity. So many people of you I know they volunteer and they did some research with people in Gaza. This is the continuity. Some people share [snorts] their open educational resources, their lectures, their note take not their note lectures. This is the um this is what I mean by moving destruction into meaning, moving death into life. So a lot of educational theories I claim um maybe you believe me, maybe not that need to be re-examined in light of human needs in a crisis. So higher education, educational theories in higher education, educational theories in general need to be re-examined in light of the needs of people in a crisis. And many lessons can be learned from Gaza. And the most important thing that we can learn is how to find or to plant a seed of hope as an act of life for every day. Not to think about tomorrow, not to think about yesterday, just to think about this moment and to act as a live maker, not to act as somebody who is destructed. If you like to reflect Ida, >> yes, what I want to say and thank you SA for all what you illustrated in this webinar. uh I want to say that education is sustained not only through infrastructure or technology but through people relationships [clears throat] and shared uh commitment. Whenever we are talking about education we are talking about creating learning environments that are res resilient, inclusive and uh capable of supporting uh students through uncertaintity. We know that uncertaintity is the normal here in Palestine. So when we want to plan for something on the link term then we have to plan it for uh dealing with uncertaintity and uh what you said about uh the means of reaching our students we have to be uh uh creative and innovation is very important. We have to know what when to use blended learning when to use online learning uh when to use facetoface and how to uh deal with each method. uh in its uh most effective way. For example, whenever we are talking about delivering lectures, what is the best for this area? It might not be the best for another area. What about assessment? What about uh engaging our students in the process? So, I think that all these can talk about the future of education. And whenever we are talking about education here, we are talking about collective commitment. We are not talking about individuals. We are talking here about relations and support from uh all bodies uh in the world who who want to help the Palestinians to uh to at least to survive and education is one important means of survival here in Palestine. Yes. Thank you. >> Thank you. I think we have covered this slide by talking about the current reality of higher education in Gaza and in Palestine in general and the kind of damage that have happened. I want to say that uh it's not only about numbers each I don't I I am I am a mathematician. I used to be a mathematician but later on I don't care about numbers. I don't care about math. I care about uh each life, each child, each student is a story to tell. Each student is alive to exist and to resist and to continue. So it's not about education is about how many how what's the percentage of learning loss, how many children are out of schools and how much children of are out of university. It's it's an edioide. We all know that. But what we should care about is the story, the meaning of what happened and how to support the people in Gaza, the people in Gene, the people in Tulkarim, the people outside, how to continue their learning, their education and to tell their stories to survive in order to survive and uh the story, the meaning of education. We are as scholars we need to reinvest in the meaning of open education in the meaning of sharing the knowledge of revisiting and reice the existing theories and the existing knowledge in order to suit others. We usually all the time we got a lot of fund uh for education education but all the time it brings the values of the funer but I think now it's the time to bring the value of the people on ground and to listen to their story and to reshape redesign the education the open education resources according to their needs and according to our own stories and here not only in Balist time also in Ukrania also in Sudan also in all places where there is a crisis because it seems that the crisis is bring is is uh being the normality nowadays. Sorry for that. I hope it will not be anymore. So uh um we I I will not concentrate on numbers but we need to concentrate more on the uh olive tree which is telling the story of the sumot the story of the resilience. So please can we go to next slide in order to talk more about the understanding of um higher education in Palestine under the crisis. Also another the next slide is please >> a quick a quick note sorry >> sorry to interrupt but just a quick note um IDA and Sida if you're able if you're able timewise to continue um I pulled the audience and and they would like us to continue and not shorten your slides. Um would you would you be able to continue? We have about five minutes until the top of the hour. Would you would it be okay if we continue? for me. Yes, I would like to. >> For me, no problem. Yeah. >> Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. >> Uh yes, but I want to add something s about education and the lessons that we learned from Palestine. In education, uh we we learned that act of hope should be remained in education in Palestine. It bridges reality with education with humanity with the feeling that they are they should be good citizen in the world. If you if you face aggression all the time, how could you uh uh tell the child or uh the students that he should be a good citizen? Then I think that education is very important because and here sum is emphasized. Smooth is demonstrated in the act of hope because when we talk about uh bridging all the pain, bridging all uh the disastrous situation that our students face, we are talking about uh a hope and we are talking about smooth resilience and so on. So what kind of resilience do we need in Vanistan to continue education? What kind of resilience of content resilient content? What kind of resilient institutions do we need? I think that uh online learning is powerful in our situation to reach our students and to keep them on the right track of humanity and this is very important for us as Palestinians to be recognized as good citizens in the world. So I think that we need to support the Palestinians to keep on the track and Summud is the bridge and hope also is the bridge to uh to contact reality with the future and to be uh as we always say that we have we have children we want them to be the best in the world. So this is the reality of the Palestinians also. Our investment is our children. So hope keeps them on track. And SA when I reviewed some of the responses of the uh students in the survey that I conducted, she said when when she was asked whom do you want to listen to your story? She said I want my dad to listen to my story. I want him to see how powerful his daughter is. So we know that whenever we are talking to our students through education, we are supporting them. Their mental health would be better than uh having trauma or or being um or having psychological uh stress and anxiety. Uh I think that something should keep them between what they live and where what they should build for their future. Yes sir. >> Thank you Ida. So uh here I want to describe to give you a picture of what's going on in Palestine and especially in Gaza through the last three years. We are talking about loss. Everybody has lost uh some many many people has lost all their families and they are the only survivor. Some people they lost their children, their parents. So we are talking about loss. We are talking about displacement. We are talking about people who are have been injured are in prison. We are talking about destruction. We are talking about all kind what you can't imagine the type of pain that is existing around us in Palestine. I think Palestine means B sometimes but I I take this idea out of my mind and move it to be hope and but then I find we can't be very optimistic and keep hoping. So I thought what we need and what we need to talk about is the word sumut. Sumud is a bridge between ben and hope. So it is the space between ben and hope that every day I need to find a way in order to plant a seed of hope in order to continue my day. And here I'm talking about people as a human about about children about schools about universities. How can a scholar from Gaza go to attend to give a class while he lost all his family and he is living he used to live in a very beautiful house in a luxury life and then suddenly he lost everything the thing that he has sum he tried to make this bridge. So in general we can say pain is the lift experience and we need education to teach us how to move this pain into a new hope and we this can't be happen just in theory or in being very optimistic and this can't happen just from religion or from believing in your idea. No, we need a tested awareness. We need to be aware about what's going on. We need to believe in our education and we need to make hope as an active practice. Not to make it uh like a big lie that we are hopeful tomorrow will be better, everything will be fine. No, I'm not talking about this kind of hope. I'm talking about a realistic hope that will make children, students, parents, scholars will be able to continue for one more day in order to continue their life. If we reflect that on the meaning of educational system, what does summood mean for educational systems? I think Gaza has gave us and Janine and Tulkarim in general in Palestine have gave us uh a practical meaning of sumud for educational systems when all the premises have been destroyed and uh at the same time the education system continue despite of all the destruction the the resilience of educational system continue on the spirit of continuity. on trying to find open resources on try to find volunteers from around the world on try to find um like uh shared material to learn from on try just to continue your life. So the resilience of individuals as a human as a student and as a teachers each one has a story of how to continue and it deserve to be shared with uh other people. So here what we are talking about is abidogi of life and abidog here the word bidogy is very important. So we talked about technology and now we talk about bidogy. So sumud is aidogy of life. How to continue despite of all the pain in order to find some little hope. Please next slide. Ida would you like to reflect I think sumuda you're you are muted but I can >> I'm sorry I'm sorry >> I'm sorry for this yes whenever we are talking about education and sumud here in Palestine we are talking as you said about strengthening our personalities and our children's and students, personalities, give give them the power to continue. And if we are talking about uh practice, living practice, we are talking not about design curricula under the umbrella of quality education or high standards of education. We are talking about the continuity of education depending on our students lived or lived experiences. uh so I think that a student who said that I was a student in the faculty of medicine and when I lost my uh leg I feel that I am a member of a generation then I think this is very important for educators to rethink about how to uh uh build our curricula to strengthen the personality and of our children and to empower them with the with the act of home and this is very important because this is reality. Loss is is in everywhere and we have to cope and adapt to what uh to what we have and to the circumstances of the Palestinians and the challenges they they face. uh so uh uh if we find support uh and solidity from other communities in the world, I think that we can uh reshape our higher education institutions and reshape education in Palestine and Sumud means a lot as and as I illustrated and it can be achieved by collaborative responsibility, not our responsibility as Palestinians only because we have experience but we need to share other experiences. We we we need uh some kind of support as we support our students we need as institutions and faculty members to be supported also by other communities. So it is a collective responsibility not an individual responsibility. Yeah, I would like to end this slide by saying that Sumut for educational system is to question the ethical and bidogical existence. So it is an ethical and bidogical issue not only a planning issue. So all theoretic theories for educational planning uh in a crisis need to connect it with sumud with values with ethics and with pedagogy. So it's like a triangle crisis ethical ethics and pedagogy in order to uh have the sum of the educational uh systems. Please next. >> Yes. When we want to talk about education in Palestine, we are not uh going to discuss infrastructure, digital uh abilities that we have uh buildings or whatever. Yes, they are important. Yes, it is the right environment for students uh all over the world. uh but when we talk about our students here in Bakistan, we are talking about three very important uh uh angles factors here. The student, the educator and well-being. Uh unless our students are supported financially, psychologically and uh from the community also we are going to face the same troubles and challenges that we are facing now. uh in emergency cases in in in all over the world uh uh I think that the crisis doesn't last for more than uh few years but here we we have the crisis lasting for prolonged periods of time. So uh uh I think that we need more than focusing on education itself. we have to focus on students as individuals also educators as individuals and well-being for both the students and the educators. Uh so uh I think that we need academic, emotional and social support for both students and educators. >> And yeah uh to add to that we need to care also about the culture, about the language and about the memory of the people who passed away and who exist and the memory and history of the institution itself. the higher education since everything has been destroyed. So we need to keep the narrative. We need to keep the memory and the story in addition to the language and the culture. Please next. Yes, this is a very important uh photo. Uh it is in um uh Gaza. There are more than 300 uh medical students who have graduate graduated uh in 2024 after two years uh of uh the crisis that has been the the if you look at the university the premises it's destroyed but these students they were in their fourth year and they insisted on continuing their education. and they graduated. I I watched the graduation and it was full of joy, full of happiness, full of sumud and insistence on continuing their education and they decided to do it on the same place where everything is destroyed just to give a message of existence, a message of that despite everything we continue. This is a message. What does education mean? Education mean that this maybe many of them they lost their families. Many of them they lost some of their parts. They have been injured. But despite of that they continue they continue in different moods through open learning resources. They continue with many many medical scholars around the world who send their notes who give their uh mentors and who support these children students in order to continue and uh the scholars themselves many of them they passed away and still many of people around the world they replace them in order to uh support them in order to continue. So here uh the message here that education is beyond infrastructure. Education is a human act. Education is a human centered perspective and I think we need to concentrate on that with any new theories that is emerged. Uh yes. Um Ida do you like to reflect or shall we move? >> Yes we we will move but I want to add something. uh uh our students usually say despite all the death around us we teach life and this is so >> thank you. >> Yeah. So yes it's not about the loss it's about the life it's about the gain it's about the social and emotional gaining if we can move please. >> So we move now to open >> next please le. So we move now to open education which is uh sorry to bring it late but I was trying all the time to keep it alive everywhere because it was a like a magic solutions for us. Uh open education resources were the magic solution for education in Gaza and in Palestine. I am not going to uh read definitions because you are all the community of open education but the most important thing it's about learning teaching and research that we can uh share reuse and uh redistribute and many of you have uh done that and this was the key issue in Palestine by using a lot of many uh universities around the world they share their material, their learning resources and they open their libraries to students in Gaza in order to use in different ways. Of course, because of the electricity and online learning, they need to reproduce them in a low uh bandwidth technology in order to be reused. The struggle of educ language was also a problem. But with the use of AI there was a lot of translation and uh thanks for many people around the world who were able to translate uh and change the articles and the material and the textbooks into small pieces of knowledge or learning objects in order to reflect on that. If you please go to next slide so I can reflect on that as uh using open education as an educational resilience. Please. >> Uh yes. Uh it is very important for us for uh three years now uh to have open education because it enabled us to reach our students in in every city in every village in marginalized areas in Palestine. Uh it helped us uh uh uh to have equity and equality between uh males and females, disabled people and uh also it enabled us to uh help our students from other uh institutions to share knowledge through our platforms. So I think that uh flexibility is very important. uh it facilitated uh sharing knowledge uh between institutions and uh we can exchange now knowledge uh uh differently from our experiences in the past. Um I think that whenever we are talking about education, open education and resilience, they are connected nowadays and uh we can uh have insights uh about the strategies that we can use uh to uh redesign education uh for the future. And uh whenever we are talking about our future, we hope that we won't face the same uncertainty. But it seems that we have to plan things uh based on this reality. So open education is one of the main sources for continuing education in Balistan. >> Yeah. Due to all its flexible characteristic and being able to share, being able to access and being able to reuse and reuse it in a way. But at the same time there was some challenges related to the language and related to the culture oriented because some of the material especially when we are talking about uh social sciences it's a bit challenging uh to use some of the open resources material. If we can go to next slide so we can uh reflect on how to sustain learning during a crisis. And the most important factor is flexibility uh to be open to different scenarios. And this is what we learned from uh we we can learn from Palestine that all the time uh there is no only way. There's not only one way fit all. We need to think all the time of different ways, different scenarios, uh different options, different tools, different methodology in order to be able to use uh open education uh and to sustain higher education. Technology was a good solution but not normal technology. We need uh a low bandwidth technology and we need offline technology in order to be used and at the same time we need technology related to trauma uh informed uh pedogology. So it's uh um because technology itself could be a a type of cause like a kind of stress for a student if they can't catch it. Um so resilience is a collective rather than an individual achievement and this is very important. It is we are talking about the community together and we are not talking about only one individual how to sustain. Uh if we can move to next slide please. Here [clears throat] uh thank you. We are we want to talk about sum as a a dynamic process. If you look at the photo, it's um uh one of our uh students in Gaza. Um he's m he's doing his viva. He's m he's a master student and this is the first uh viva happened in Gaza in a tent. Uh despite of everything they did it his the name of the student is Tamir and uh he succeed. It took him two years to finish his uh master degree despite of all the uh destruction despite of all the destruction. So when we are talk talking about sum it's not uh unique meaning and it's not a fixed process it's moving and from time to time you everyone and every community can develop its methodology of sum its meaning of sumud. It's not about accepting what's going on. No, it's rejecting it but at the same time find a way to continue your education. I think nobody want to sit in a tent and uh ex you know defense his thesis but because we can't do the other way we will do this way so it's not the best choice but at the same time okay our university is closed our university is destroyed but I will graduate I will defend my thesis I will continue my life I will exist I will celebrate and I will smile and I will be there despite of everything and this is so it's not uh to accept the oppression it's not to accept the pain being no we reject being we don't like it we we resist it inside ourself but at the same time we find ways this is what higher education should offer how to deal with that so it is inventing tools for survival al inventing tools to overlap the pain and to find a new scenario a new way a new method in order to survive and here survive not uh I don't mean it as uh as a person but to survive also as an as education to survive as a scholar to survive as an educational institution and this will not happen without awareness without the awareness that I want that otherwise is I will collapse and just say I can't. It's impossible. Nobody want to learn. I heard from many colleagues around the world that say if we were in Gaza we we we will not continue. We can't continue. But I know that nobody knows unless he is in the situation. Uh we don't know what will happen. I remember I was uh sitting on um one of the checkpoints going to a conference in another city and uh my speech was the first speech but I was unable to reach. I did it while I was in the car on the checkpoint through my mobile and uh I was smiling. I thought uh my aim is to go to the conference. I did it. I don't care about the checkpoint. I care about my aim. my aim is to do to attend the conference even if it is uh virtual. So it is the awareness of how to continue your life. uh please next if I does not want to reflect on that I'll keep >> I want to say something just one thing which is whenever we are talking about sum we are talking about adaptation and if you watch TV and news people started crying after every event but nowadays if you watch the differences you will see what's meant by adaptation they start uh uh collecting their things and uh uh doing what should be after the attack or after uh the disaster that they have. So this is what's meant by adaptation. As I said, if she doesn't attend the conference in person, then she can uh attend it online. So always we have plans A and BL B. This is what's meant by SUMO here in Palestine. We don't have only one way to do what we want. we have alternatives. We always look for alternatives to survive. Yes sir. >> And uh here I want to concentrate on the faculty development uh in order to strengthen educational um uh systems the resilience. The most important thing is the to care not only about the learners, we need also to care about the scholars themselves in order to be able to continue education. And uh this could be through trauma informed pedagogy to train them to give them tools and this is could be done through open educational resources a self-running course that all scholars in crisis settings could uh in different languages could uh use it in order to give themselves the strength and to conduct first aid psychological support for themselves in order to be able uh to continue. Uh this could be done also by beer mentoring from people around the world that each one can mentor some colleague from Gaza because you know when you are under a crisis some days you are uh your strength are very high and you are in a high percentage of sumot next day maybe you are in a very low emotion and you will be affected. So it is not uh onetoone. We need mentoring, we need coaching, we need support from people around the world in order to be able uh to to continue uh smooth and to develop the faculty in to strength their um emotional educational continuity. So the well-being of the faculty members and scholars is also very important as much as the well-being of the students. All the time we concentrate on students, we need to concentrate on the faculty. Uh if we can move to next slide, please. Yes, as we said, education is an act of hope here in Palestine. Whenever we are talking about uh education, we are talking about supporting our students to uh build their uh futures uh and to have hope for survival. So it is very important for us to uh to change the role of the educator here in Palestine. The educator is not only uh the person who transfers knowledge and skills but nowadays he's the monitor, the facilitator, the person who can support his students emotionally and psychologically. So we whenever we are talking about this change in the role of the um teacher and the educator we are talking about uh uh hope and about bridging uh reality to uh to the future. Uh so I think that it is very important to uh um to have a meaningful action and partnership with other institutions in in all over the world to be able to share knowledge and know more about how to uh give hope to our students. Even we are in the uh field and we might teach others about how we deal with our students, how we support them even financially sometimes because you cannot separate yourself from your students. uh but we need to share uh the experiences of our countries who fa who who have crisis and who uh um and people who could manage uh to survive and to have quality education during crisis. So I think that this is very >> important for us. We are the hope of our students and other institutions in the world are uh our hope to survive. Yes. >> And I would like to reflect here that hope here does not mean a dream that is delayed to the future. No, hope here is a lived experience. Hope here is an ongoing daily practice. Hope here is a pedagogical act. Hope here is a digital transformative practice from all stakeholders of the education sector. So it's not hope as has been defined before as is a beautiful dream for tomorrow. No, hope is about today. Hope is about our practice. H hope is about our lived experience. I will not deny what I am in. No, I ac I don't accept it. I reject it. But at the same time, I act I transform it into a new uh way to survive. Please. Next. Yes. And uh uh I I believe and this is um of a new theory of Sumud and hope has emerged from Gaza. And I believe that uh this is emerged from lived experience and need to we need to look at it as a creative idea uh in order to use it. So we can use open education in a creative way by uh adaptation of them to the local context and uh we need to root them in solidarity. So we we need to listen to the people's stories. We need to listen to the educators and we need to do it in a collective way in order to be able to continue and transform it into a bological way not only together with a technological way. So um uh a new way of bridging between pain and hope through sum. Uh please next hida if you like to reflect. >> Yes I think that we covered all these uh items. Whenever we are talking about land we have to keep sum on the land. We have also to know uh that whenever we are talking about summood it is not for a short period of time. It lasts as you said we we we were born in crisis and maybe we will die also while the crisis exists so we don't know uh when to stop or how to stop so it is endless I think and u whenever we are talking about our culture I think that our culture is or plays a major role in uh land means everything to us we we know that our parents raised us to love land to love home our homes to love our memories and uh of course education is a main part of of our culture in Palestine that's why pedagoguji is very important and whenever we are talking about ioide we are talking about uh the need to solidity the need of solidity from uh other institutions in the world and uh how can we survive? How can we keep Sumud alive? Uh whenever we are talking about social cohesion, about relationships either inside Palestine or outside Palestine, we are talking about Sumud. So Sumud is resistance I I think and it is also about resilience. It's both resistance and resilience. And this is what the act of hope that we have to keep alive and to keep thinking about about our futures and about how to cope, how to adapt with what we have uh how to enjoy what we have even we don't have a lot but we know how to enjoy what we have and I think that it is very important that SA illustrated her experience in uh for uh or in this webinar because it is important to talk about the situation that maybe no one knows about unless he goes and search on Google about education in uh Palestine. So thank you SA for your um presentation and for your illustrations of Sumud in education in Palestine. Thank I would like to move the worry of sumud for all the participants to think about it because I think we are uh since education is an act of humanity. So we all need to think of sumud as our daily act in order to because I think when somebody around the world is in pain we will all be in vain despite we agree on it or we not despite we feel it directly or will we not and this is part of what we learned that we are living under the same sky on the same earth and education is our tool for existence our tool for better life our tool for uh uh well-being. We are all connected together. I don't think that we are separated. We are all one unit together. So, please think about it in this way. Let's move to next slide. I think we are very close to the end. uh um by saying that stages of sumud start with survival and then to be able to continue and to do different actions in order to continue and hopefully one day we will reach the reconstruction. Um but maybe one day uh we will reach this part of reconstruction in order to live uh together. And uh please can we move to uh the end in order to uh this is a very important slide because we are to talking here about sum as a meaning and as a memory by listening to people who are telling their stories because each story is a life. Each life is very important. It has its own meaning and this could not be done without uh your collaboration, your uh um uh at the same time your being able to your openness in order to listen to the story and to keep memory to document it. Art is a very important way of u ch especially for children and for youth in order to explain their pain and their story and to keep their language. I think the narrative is very important to keep resistance here. Resistance means to resist the oppression in yourself, inside yourself and in your community in order to be able to continue. And I think education is a tool for uh that. And uh uh if we move to the last um if you like to reflect on that uh I think you are you're so sumud and daily life. Sumud is a daily life like a mother carrying school bags while displaced. As we said before, a teacher without electricity try to offer online and offline lessons. A child lifing amid rebel trying to find his toy. This is kind of sumood as a daily practice. A mother trying to cook for her children. Life regen regenerated daily as it's ongoing. So the trauma is continuous. It exist. People are traumatized. But it will we need to know how to deal with that. We need to refuse to normalize oppression. This is sum. We need to make a meaning make a meaning for our daily life. And we need to search and fight for peace and justice and dignity together. All of us together. Not Palestinian alone. Because my dignity is related to your dignity. Justice should be on all the ground. If you please move to next slide and then I will uh reflect on that. Ida. >> Yes. Uh you can imagine what kind of hope do we need as Palestinians mainly people in Gaza if you see these images. uh so I think that uh whenever we share such images we are sharing thoughts we are sharing experiences and uh a hope should be there to keep these people alive uh unless they have hope for future they have hope for their every uh day situation everyday thing in every day so I think that these people uh will show more trauma and will show more mental depression and illness. So Palestinians are the central uh for justice meaning and liberation. So what we need is uh our relations to be strengthened solidity between our institutions and other people's institution uh in in the world. uh this is how we can give uh hope to ourselves as educators before sharing it with our students. Uh we enjoy everything we have. Yes, even these people whom you see we billinians learn how to to enjoy what we have even sometimes we we have nothing but still we need to to to feel that we are human beings. we have the same rights of human be uh beings in other countries in the world. Uh and education is the main factor that keeps in touch uh uh with our humanity. Uh thank you very much. Thank you Heather and Ba. I think that maybe S you can end this presentation with >> I will end by saying uh open education when connected to sumud becomes more than access to material. It becomes a collective commitment to educational justice just justice. It says that learning should not stop because institutions are damaged, because students are displaced or because systems are under pressure. Education should continue. Open education has much to offer for Palestine and people who believe in open education can give a lot to people under a crisis everywhere around the world. And also I would like to say that Palestine has a lot to give to the world through her uh and a lot to give to shape open education through the narrative through the best practices through the discovery uh and innovative way of resilience and finding ways in order to continue. Uh I I think we are together can do a lot through open education in order to support all oppressed people around the world and all traumatized people around the world. Together we can make a difference. One um very small thing can make a difference. Even if you just share your material, even if you just share your smile, even if you just think and uh pray for people who are oppressed, uh then education will be better and the world will be a better place to live all together in it. Thank you very much for this opportunity. Thank you Heather, Paola, Lisa and all the organizer. uh we are happy to answer any question and we believe that uh knowledge will slip through cracks. So keep keep creating knowledge and keep smiling. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, Sida and Ida. It's been like a very uh it's it's been like a very interesting journey to say the least and uh thank you for taking us uh through well from pain to hope through Summud together with you. Um we have some questions that uh came up from the audience. So I would give voice just to one and then we will share if possible given the time that we uh spent listening to you which was the priority maybe we can share uh the list of questions that we collected with your answers as a document later on but there is a question in the chat that says and Katherine Kroning hi Katherine uh wrote it how can we as open education community contribute to sustaining and strengthening that hope through meaningful action and partnership. A very practical question I would say. Uh >> yes. Yes. Uh it is very important for us in open education to share uh resources. First of all flexibility is very important and obvious mainly whenever we are talking about obus we are talking about resilience and so on. Uh so we have uh some examples of initiatives of uh other institutions uh in Europe and uh other countries uh that they um uh delivered online courses and training courses either for uh the faculty of uh the faculty members or the students themselves. uh whenever we are talking about also uh initiatives such as uh um uh mobility between our students and students uh in other institutions then sharing knowledge our students can learn very fast if you know baba they are smart so many students are very smart here maybe because we don't have anything else to do except learning and uh reading and so Uh so mobility is very important. we can be open to other cultures and other um kind of education. And when we uh transfer this knowledge and this experience of our faculty members and students to here to Palestine then it would be an added value to resilience and so um also whenever we are talking about uh initiatives and projects to um for capacity building uh of uh faculty members, it is very important for for us and I share several international projects for capacity building and they had positive impact on our uh institutions and renovating policies and uh uh redesigning some um uh materials and the content of some courses. uh uh how we learned how to uh present our material online, how to use uh digital literacy uh uh perfectly with our students. So uh I think that we have so many different uh means and best ways of collaboration to strengthen our institutions here in Palestine through open education. said that do you want to add anything else? >> No, I'm fine. We can move to next. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. Welcome.