Psychological First Aid in Support of Children Affected by the Humanitarian Crisis in Ukraine: the Experiences of Children, Caregivers and Helpers

Support of children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine: Bridging practice and learning through the sharing of experience

Global health

“Do you have an experience supporting children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine that you would like to share with colleagues? Tell us what happened and how it turned out. Be specific and detailed so that we can understand your story.” This was one of the questions that applicants to the Certificate peer learning programme on Psychological First Aid (PFA) in support of children affected by the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine could choose to answer. If you are reading this, you may be one of the education, health, or social work professionals who answered questions like these. You may also be a policy maker or organizational leader asking yourself how children from Ukraine and the people who work with them can be better supported. The Geneva Learning Foundation (TGLF), in collaboration with the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) and with support from the European …

Philadelphia, early morning

From communication to education

Content strategy, Thinking aloud

There is of course an intimate relationship between communication and education. In many universities, both sit under the discipline of psychology. However, in most international organizations, these tend to be siloed functions. Communication often focuses on external media relations and, in the last few years, has expanded to take on the role of organizing social media presence. Education is reduced to ‘training’ or subsumed under staff (or talent) development, sometimes (but not always) inside of human resources. Worst-case scenario: an organization may not even have a centralized learning function, even though a quick survey would probably reveal that learning, education and training are at the core of its knowledge production and dissemination. Communication counts eyeballs, downloads, or retweets. Education tracks what is happening behind the eyeballs – and changes it, in measurable ways. This is equally true of the industrial-age classroom (and its organizational corollary, the training workshop) as it is of online learning environments that maximize technology’s amazing economy …

Maybe old learning isn’t so bad, after all?

Writing

When I first saw Professor Cope’s photos of a 1983 elementary school classroom, I scoffed. It was so obvious that the “communications and knowledge architecture” was one-way, focused on rote learning and rewarding good behavior which involved staying safely “inside the box”. How easy to critique, deconstructing all of the ways in which this particular “banking” form of education was unlikely to intentionally “deposit” anything that might actually be useful to the future lives of these school children. How awful, I thought, and how at odds with everything I try to put into practice with respect to my own professional role. Today’s MOOCs and flipped classrooms, with their objectives of making active knowledge-making ubiquitous, make 1983 look like the Dark Ages of education. And yet. And yet this classroom very closely resembles the ones in which I grew up, with 5th grade in 1980 as a reference point. And I …