Evolving approaches to educating children from nomadic communities

Abstract

Evolving policies have increasingly aimed to include nomadic groups in EFA, but an overemphasis on mobility has distracted policy makers from going beyond access logistics to consider learning needs within nomads' contemporary livelihoods and cultural values.Notable global trends are the growth and institutionalization of forms of Alternative Basic Education (provided by state and nonstate actors for "disadvantaged" learners) and advocacy of Open and Distance Learning.Case studies of mobile pastoralists in Kenya, India, and Afghanistan, and of sea nomads in Indonesia, illustrate policy and practices on the ground. They highlight a need to address equality, equivalence, and learner progression more closely, rather than adopting strategies for education inclusion that reinforce nomadic groups' sociopolitical marginalization. This requires an extended post-2015 engagement with the larger political question of education's role in undermining, or sustaining and validating, mobile livelihoods. 2In keeping with development narratives of education as a public and individual good (Sen 1999; UNHDR 1990), there have been repeated calls for Education for All (EFA) to make an "active commitment" to removing the educational disparities faced by nomadic groups (WDEFA 1990; WEF 2000).During the EFA decades, global and national policy discourses have increasingly recognized the need to make services more flexible and diverse in order to include "nomadic"populations. These comprise millions of people, living on both land and water, who use mobility strategically and skillfully to support their livelihoods. Some of these (known in the literature as "peripatetics", cf. Rao [1987]) offer specialized services to others. Others are hunter-gatherers, sea nomads, fisher folk, and mobile pastoralists-all of whom deploy diverse mobility strategies to secure fleeting and dispersed natural resources, and rely significantly on resources of the commons. Many of these are among the "missing learners" of EFA discourses.While the policy visibility of nomadic groups has grown during EFA, attention has largely focused on broadening delivery modalities-a focus that is consistent with framing "learner mobility" as the key barrier to access. While access is important, concerns about it have eclipsed attention to learning needs and to the pressing issue of how formal education intersects with and supports livelihood security. At the same time, the view that nomadic groups suffer from extreme "education deprivation" (cf. UNESCO 2010) is contentious. It negates the value of livelihood-specific endogenous education and, in so doing, fails to engage with how formal education can and should interface with and complement, rather than replace, such education.As we move into the Sustainable Development Goals era, it is timely to reflect on why it has proved difficult to accommodate nomadic groups within the EFA movement. It is more urgent now than perhaps ever before to give attention to how education should respond

Competency Profile of the Digital and Online Teacher in Future Education

“…As education moves towards the goal of "education for all' and to help achieve the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 4 to provide quality education for all, there will be increasing use of digital technology especially for learners who live in remote locations and for those who cannot physically attend school because of a lack of infrastructure (Gaskell, 2018;UNESCO, 2015). Such a future will require that teachers be trained to use digital technology to provide virtual education to learners in remote areas and for nomadic learners (Ally & Tsinakos, 2014;Dyer, 2016). With technology, the learners, rather than the teachers, are at the center of learning; they develop their knowledge base and create an understanding of the world by being active learners (Anagün, 2018;Guo, 2018;McWilliams, 2016).…”

Sustaining learner participation and progression through networked schooling: A systemic approach for Mobile Out of School Children

“…Making schooling itself mobileusing boats, buses, tents and camels, according to contextappears an obvious solution. For highly mobile learners, actions on the ground rarely match policy aspirations (Swift et al 2010, Dyer 2016, Krätli 2001, Manyire 2011, Koissabe 2013, although robust evidence of what has actually been tried is slim (Dyer 2016, Bengtsson andDyer 2017). Depending on mobility patterns in local contexts, mobile schooling provided at small scale, within well-resourced NGO-led programming, seems to have demonstrated some success (cf.…”

“…Additional pressure of numbers on a host school also compounds existing issues: the studentteacher ratio is generally high and student numbers are usually already fluctuating long before incoming learners arrive, so their presence intensifies these difficulties. School provisioning and funding formulae reflect sedentary norms and are not designed to enable the system to cope with ebbs and flows (Dyer 2016). While practices on the ground in rural areas may not adhere to the learner: teacher ratio norm (ca.…”

“…This re-framing of 'going to school' has useful potential to benefit girls and boys across the wide spectrum of livelihoods that depend on mobility (cf. Dyer 2016). In this paper, we provide an illustration of how it has been worked through in Ethiopia's pastoralist-dominated Somali region, and reflect in closing on wider policy implications.…”

Educating South Asia’s Internally Migrating Children

“…The Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) framework recognizes "migrants" as one of the most vulnerable communities who must be "empowered" and provided "inclusive and equitable quality education" (UN 2015). In light of poor progress, and the SDG agenda's explicit commitment to "leave no one behind" and to "reach the furthest behind first" (UN 2015), why migrating children have been so "left behind" by the EFA movement (Dyer 2014(Dyer , 2016 requires close attention.…”