Past Program

On March 9, 2022, the Whole Child Development for Displaced Learners Network has organized a series of highly interactive roundtable discussions open to anyone working to anchor whole child development in education systems for displaced children and youth.

Below, is a list and descriptions of the different roundtable discussions held that day. 

13:00 to 14:30 CET - Assessment of Whole Child Development: Challenges and Solutions    
In this session different stakeholders have shared examples of how they are assessing Whole Child Development. They have explored challenges and solutions: What types of data are they collecting? What tools are they using? what are the gaps? Lessons learned? How do we ensure that we move beyond a sectoral focus.

15:00 to 16:00 CET - Whole Child Development: Stakeholder Engagement 
Stakeholder engagement is at the core of all programs and initiatives that are working with displaced learners and include the individual, their family, the community, civil society, and all levels of government in a balanced nature. In all cases, there should be the application of inclusiveness, cultural language and ethnic identity to address the whole child. If appropriate for sustainability, there should be effective monitoring and assessment. In order to address stakeholder engagement and resulting implementation, the approach should be global in nature and tailored to meet requirements at the local level. We offered the following questions to address the best approach to create an all-encompassing strategy: 1.) What is your role as a stakeholder? 2.) What are the guiding principles that stakeholders should follow (tools) 3.) In your experience, what has been hard to achieve (the obstacles, challenges?) 4.) What are the responsibilities to be an effective stakeholder (priorities. access, political will?)

17:00 to 18:30 CET - Whole Child Development: Deciding What Works and Why
What works in terms of promoting whole child development in one context and for one group of children may not be effective elsewhere or with a different group. This session asked participants to consider what are the important factors when it comes to deciding what works? Through a series of question prompts, participants were asked to reflect on sources of evidence that are relevant, meaningful, and useful; mechanisms for localizing resources; and how systems determine needs. As these discussions are likely to throw up common challenges, participants were further asked to reflect their particular role in disrupting the status quo when it comes to the usual 'pitfalls'. This was an opportunity to listen to a diversity of actors within the education ecosystem and take these discussions out of this session and into our work.

19:00 to 20:00 CET - Exploring Effective Advocacy Across the Education Ecosystem - What Works Best for Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)? 
Our advocacy session explored the question, "what does effective advocacy look like", by examining how advocacy efforts materialize across different levels of the education ecosystem. This enabled us to consider both, challenges and effective practices, when conducting advocacy on SEL from perspectives of ministry officials, donors, NGO staff, school officials, teachers and parents/caregivers. The presentation portion of our session was conducted as an interview of various stakeholders (i.e. donor, NGO/government partner, school official, teacher, parent) with our Ministry of Education official. The discussion portion of our session divided participants into smaller groups, based on roles included in the interview. The smaller groups wiere tasked with discussing challenges with SEL advocacy and also share promising practices to describe 'what works' for effective SEL advocacy, based on their group's perspective.
 

Through the roundtable discussions the Whole Child Development for Displaced Learners Network seeks to:

• Increase the attention to and salience of the importance of whole child development within education systems.
• Engage with peers and other education stakeholders who understand the importance of the inclusion of PSS/SEL in education, and have knowledge/solutions to share.
• Provide a means to draw upon cutting edge insights from participants and partners’ existing and future research, policy and thought leadership work.
• Shape the debate and advance thinking and policy around whole child development, particularly in the context of displacement.
• Produce a set of advocacy focused essays from conference contributors to be published by Salzburg Global and Diplomatic Courier. After the third conference, all essays will be collated into an e-book.
   

All sessions were opened to anyone interested in engaging in meaningful dialogue around whole child development and social and emotional learning, particularly for children living in displacement.