Sabreen Salman Mazeed 2026/07/07 Studies 54 Visits
Education policies constitute the regulatory framework that countries rely on to guide the educational process and achieve their strategic objectives. Educational policy is defined as “the comprehensive system of principles, goals, and mechanisms adopted by the state to organize the educational process and direct it towards achieving comprehensive development, while taking into account local and emergency contexts” (Al-Suriti, 2024, p. 15). These policies are applied with the active participation of government agencies, international organizations, and community institutions in constantly changing frameworks (Edwards et al., 2024, p. 3). Of course, these policies are built to be implemented in school environments that have appropriate infrastructure and available physical and human resources, but reality imposes exceptional measures to measure the flexibility of these policies and their ability to adapt. This is what happened to us in the Gaza reality, when we replaced plastic tents to take the place of classrooms, and the sand covered with stones and pieces of cloth became the classroom seat, and the plastic tent wall was the divider between several educational tents, without preventing the entry of external sounds and noise inside the tent. Here arises the fundamental question: how can educational policies adapt to this harsh reality?
I will start in this paper from the position of a “field experience testimony,” as I am the director of an educational initiative where I live the reality of educational policies as they are practiced daily, from the heart of the educational institution, indeed in the heart of the field, among children whose schools and homes have been destroyed, their books burned, and they have lost their families, yet they do not relent in seeking knowledge, alongside teachers who stand as beacons of knowledge, teaching their students while they are starving and in pain. This testimony aims to describe a realistic image of the challenges facing the implementation of educational policies within educational tents, and the activities that teachers innovate to adapt educational policies to fit the available conditions and capabilities.
The educational initiative I experience is held in a group of adjacent tents set up in the school’s courtyards, gardens, and playgrounds, after classrooms became shelters for displaced persons who lost their homes, or part of them was partially or completely destroyed due to the war. The educational tent is medium-sized tents that can accommodate no more than thirty students at best, but the bigger problem lies in their arrangement next to each other; where sounds from each tent overlap with others, making the classroom scene a chaotic auditory experience that the teacher cannot prevent from reaching them, thus making it difficult for the student to concentrate on the explanation amidst the sounds of neighboring tents. Moreover, the ventilation and lighting are inadequate, relying on small openings made in the tent wall, and the teacher may have to close it to prevent the sun’s heat or cold from reaching the students. In summer, the temperature inside the tent rises alarmingly, making it impossible for students to sit inside, and the teacher cannot teach in an unsuitable learning environment. In contrast, winter brings another hardship, as rainwater seeps from the top and bottom of the tent, and the lesson may have to stop or relocate them elsewhere. As for how students sit inside the tent, at first, they sat close together on the ground, separated from the tent floor by prayer mat pieces, cardboard pieces, or old cloth pieces spread on the sand. There was no school furniture available. The teacher himself did not find a chair to sit on during the lesson, nor a table to place his books and papers on, or to follow the correction of students’ notebooks, so he would pile his books next to him or carry them in his hands throughout the lesson. After some time into the initiative, the local community mobilized with humanitarian initiatives and simple school furniture was provided for students to sit on, and students felt hope returning again, but the joy of this achievement did not last long; as the seats began to break due to continuous daily use, and the large number of students who sat on them, leading students again to sit on the ground, and seeing broken furniture inside the tents became a visual expression of the weakness of solutions in the absence of clear policies to secure a stable educational environment. We cannot overlook the absence of…