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Safe Passage Young Leaders: Education for Social Change in the Virtual World
Safe Passage International helps refugees access safe and legal routes to sanctuary. Through a combination of campaigning,
advocacy and legal casework, they influence policy and work directly with young people and families to help them reunite with
loved ones and reach sanctuary. Youth Advocacy and Campaigns Organiser Ruth Holtom works with an inspirational group of young people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds – Safe Passage Young Leaders - who speak out about issues that affect them and others like them and campaign for a more welcoming, just and equal world. She shares her experience of virtual engagement with the group.
Every Tuesday morning, I open my laptop and send round a Zoom link to the young people I have the privilege of working with, reminding them that we will be meeting that evening. Then, just before our evening session, I log on to Zoom and get ready to welcome them into our virtual space. Their names pop up in the waiting room, and we all gather on the screen, our faces lit up by the glow of our phones or computer screens.
Compared to preparing for face-to-face workshops, running these weekly Zoom sessions might seem simple and stress-free. Instead of filling my bags with flipchart paper, risk assessments and petty cash, I simply log on to Zoom, share my screen and create some breakout rooms. But as anyone currently facilitating online learning knows, youth engagement in this new virtual world brings a whole host of new challenges.
After hours of algebra and English on computer screens, often struggling to connect to unreliable WiFi, it can be tiring and draining for the young people we work with to participate in additional sessions in the evenings. It is a challenge to ensure that everyone can join our sessions, when there is such disparity in digital access, homelife and English language levels. However, I have been constantly astounded by the Young Leaders’ energy and commitment to bringing about the change they want to see in the world, even when they are unable to meet face to face.
Safe Passage Young Leaders
These inspiring young people from refugee and asylum-seeking backgrounds meet weekly online to make friends, learn new skills, and work together to make change and challenge injustice. The young people I get to work with are experts by experience on refugee policy and they care passionately about creating safe and legal routes to safety for people like them. Since the pandemic began, the Safe Passage Young Leaders have achieved an incredible amount from the confines of their own homes. In the past nine months, they have:
Produced a video calling on politicians to protect family reunion for refugees.
- Written and delivered a letter to members of the House of Lords urging them to vote to protect family reunion in the Immigration Bill.
- Met influential MPs and peers online and shared their views and opinions on issues relating to asylum and immigration.
- Got involved with Safe Passage as an organisation, shared their ideas and expertise, and helped us to recruit new members of staff.
- Collaborated with other groups of young refugee campaigners, such as Hummingbird Young Leaders and Kent Refugee Action Network Youth Forum, creating connections across geographical divides and building strong networks of solidarity and support.
In this new year of 2021, the Young Leaders have a lot to speak out about. Now that the UK has left the EU, and with it the Dublin
Regulation family reunion scheme, refugees must apply for family reunification through domestic immigration rules, which are much more restrictive. Furthermore, various other resettlement schemes for refugees are still on pause due to the pandemic, and the government has recently announced that it will not be continuing resettlement for child refugees from Europe.
Campaigning with Safe Passage, the Young Leaders are hoping to influence policy on these issues in an upcoming government review on safe and legal routes. Over the past year they have proven to be brave and unflinching in their words and actions, and I have no doubt that these young people will stop at nothing to hold the Government to account.
If you have any questions about Safe Passage’s campaigns or the Young Leaders group, contact Ruth at ruth@safepassage. org.uk. If you know a young person who would be interested in joining the Young Leaders, you can find out more on our website.
Article from Engage issue 22.
BY RUTH HOLTOM • Jun 18, 2021
Education has been identified as a key aspect to achieve societal development. This has been highlighted with the 2015 sustainable development goals, with goal 4 being to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education has also shifted to being a means to transmit peace and global tolerance through increasing the understanding of other cultures. This has tied in with the rise of capacity development initiatives in development practice that seek to empower and enable individuals and communities to build upon their preexisting capacities. It is a key strategy to ensure educational development by international organisations, governments, and communities. The main principles of capacity development are participation, locally driven agenda, ongoing learning, long term investment and building upon local capacities. By integrating these principles into educational development, it allows for school communities to become involved in peace building activities. Through following a locally driven agenda schools can become centres for fostering peace and understanding and address local issues that may prevent children from attending or staying in school. This is what the UNESCO Associated Schools network aims to achieve by involving schools and educational institutes at a global level, creating networks of educators and students that share information, knowledge and spread UNESCOs value of peace. It aims to join schools through four pillars of learning: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together to create sustainable learning and teaching environments that involve communities in conservation activities, petitions and cultural events. Schools undertake social and educational projects that allow students to get involved with supporting developmental and humanitarian organisations, through fundraising and field trips. Recently The Steve Sinnott Foundation organised an international trip to Japan for the 70th Anniversary of UNESCO ASPnet for the Arts and Culture for peace exchange, bringing together students from The Gambia, Oman, Singapore, Korea and Coventry. By expanding education to include individuals and communities’ local agendas and addressing international issues, education can provide a platform for ongoing learning and development. It allows for students to develop their ability to think critically and connect with others meaning they can both learn and understand issues that might not be highlighted otherwise. By allowing schools, students, and communities to connect and direct their own development and focusing on developing existing capacities, the meaning and aim of education shifts from traditional roles to being focused upon understanding and peace.
Women’s and Girls’ Full Participation in Society: “Are Palestinian women reaping the benefits of education in similar ways to the rest of the world?” Palestinian women continue to be some of the most educated women in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. While women’s academic participation is indeed measurable, they are not reaping the benefits of education. Palestinian women, especially educated Palestinian women, are overlooked, and under-represented in Palestinian society. Current indicators reveal that access to education has not significantly improved women’s status in Palestinian society. It is therefore imperative to benefit from Palestinian women’s education and skills in society not only as a social right, but as a development necessity. The percentage of educated women in Palestine is remarkable and one of the highest around the world with a 99.6% in 2020 for completion in primary and upper secondary. While Palestinian women have always been visible in the national struggle, they have limited leadership and decision making-opportunities. Their participation in civil society and the formal government has been restricted. In decision making positions, women comprise only 8.3% of all ministers, 0% of ministerial representatives, and 6% of assistants to the ministerial representatives. Within all ministries women comprise 30% of staff. In the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, women are the majority, comprising 68.1%. Education unions leading by example: Education unions have viewed the education of future generations, with a focus on girls, as a form of protest, resistance to the country and Arab region’s ongoing-conflict, displacement, and upheaval. Accordingly, women and girls’ education has thrived in recent years. COVID 19 crisis a catalyst for transforming education unions: Education unions voiced that an appropriate response to COVID -19 in the education sector should consider the rights and best interests of students, teachers and education support personnel and involve education unions in developing the containment and recovery measures. This response accelerated the transformation process of the largest union in Palestine, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT). They want to have a truly representative union and integrate women educators in the union decision making structures. Despite the pandemic, GUPT continued to engage in social dialogue with the government, continued to fight for decent working conditions and welfare for teachers and education personnel and engage in a process of trade union transformation reflecting the realities of the 21st century. The union stepped up during the rapid shift to distance learning, they have developed online programmes, trained teachers on distance learning and supported students to decrease inequality among learners. The union also urged that the transformation should also challenge discrimination and increase women’s involvement in education, in trade unions and in society. This process was a driver to enhance women’s leadership within the union’s structures. From words to action: Mechanisms put in place to enhance women educators’ participation. With the support of international sister organisations, GUPT developed their own strategy to promote women’s participation and leadership within their union and in education. They developed a strategy, and we identified the following objectives: Increase the number of women in key union leadership and decision-making bodies at the regional and national level, through capacity development training on leadership for women. They have also introduced policies such as gender quotas and allocated budgets for their gender equity programmes. Activate the role of their Women’s Committee and prioritise the recruitment of young female teachers. The union is also working to identify and address the barriers to women’s participation in union leadership and decision making. In education the union is working with the Ministry of Education to review school books so that gender discrimination is not inherently written into the curriculum. GUPT is also organising sensitization training for educators so that discriminatory stereotypes are not perpetuated in the classroom. Finally, for the GUPT it is important to secure the right to education for all Palestinian students, especially girls. Teaching and learning must occur in quality, safe environments. Every effort must be made to eradicate the different types of violence that occur all too frequently in and around educational settings.
Early in my work as the president of my local teacher’s union I was invited to a community leader meeting about reforming the teaching profession. Amidst the discussion of harsher teacher evaluations, raising standards for teaching, creating easier entry into the profession, merit pay for “good” teachers, and more, I brought up the fact that working conditions and salaries hadn’t meaningfully changed since the 1960s. “We’re in favor of paying math and science teachers more so they can be compensated closer to what they’d get in the private sector,” a business community representative replied, offering an idea that was not new to me. Full disclosure: my dad was a career math teacher from that era of math and science majors who answered their government’s call to become math and science teachers who would boost the United States of America’s bench in the space race. I could easily picture how a larger salary could have changed our family’s budget. Teachers’ unions like mine (and my dad’s) addressed pay disparities based on gender that were common a generation earlier by fighting for a salary schedule focused on experience and education. So, I offered back, “If we want to differentiate pay related to the most important job in education, then we should seriously consider paying kindergarten and first grade teachers more than anyone because they teach students to read, which is the rocket science of education,” alluding to an influential issue of AFT’s American Educator magazine from 1999. “Well, I’m sure those teachers are fine but I have volunteered in first grade classrooms and their work doesn’t compare to math and science teachers.” Oh. Interesting. We clearly weren’t going to see eye to eye in our differentiated pay conversation. More so, there are decades long gender stereotypes lurking behind that conversation. In addition to the history of gender based pay inequities, elementary school teachers are assumed to be female while more secondary teachers are male. There has long been a disconnect between the importance communities, elected officials, and countries have placed on education. From local funding efforts to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, support for education is nearly universal in most communities. That support for education doesn’t always translate to support for educators and, with a majority of educators worldwide being female, that sets a dangerous precedent. Our teachers deserve professional working conditions because teaching and learning begins with their expertise. Additionally, a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions and so administrators, public officials, or policymakers mistreating, undermining, or disrespecting teachers sends a message to students that teachers do not deserve respect, fair treatment, or professionalization. In addition to a stubborn lack of recognition of teachers as professionals, a vicious cycle exists around salary. Teachers have historically low wages because it is feminized and because it is feminized teacher’s wages are suppressed. The evidence that belonging to a union, with the ability to negotiate collectively, improves teacher compensation is key in disrupting this vicious cycle. Teaching has been a feminized profession for over a century and, despite efforts to diversify the profession, remains a feminized profession. In fact, the OECD reports that the gender gap increased from 2005 to 2019. In order for our students to have the most representative learning conditions, we need the most representative teachers so we must continue to diversify teaching to represent everyone in our communities, including by gender. Efforts like Black Men Teach, active in my home state of Minnesota, can make a meaningful difference. I would posit treating the current majority female teaching population as professionals—with professional wages, recognizing their expertise in teaching and learning rather than infantilizing them, respecting their commitment to education rather than exploiting it—would both model for students the way to treat women (and thereby model for female students how they can expect to be treated in any profession) and create the conditions for everyone to see teaching as a profession worth pursuing.
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