Keeping Children Learning Through Displacement in Gaza

Ask a displaced parent in Gaza what they worry about at night and food, water, and safety will come first — they must. But listen a little longer and another worry surfaces, quieter and more persistent: my children are forgetting how to be students. Months without a classroom do not simply pause an education; they erode it.

Fight for Palestine’s education program exists because we believe a child’s right to learn does not expire in displacement. This season, our teams are running 14 temporary learning spaces serving around 1,800 children, staffed by volunteer teachers who were educators before displacement and refused to stop being educators after it.

What a temporary classroom looks like

Our learning spaces are deliberately simple: a tent or a spared room, floor mats, a whiteboard, and boxes of supplies that pack away each evening. Children attend in two-hour shifts grouped roughly by age, which lets a single space serve well over a hundred students a day.

Simplicity is a design choice, not a compromise. A classroom that can be assembled in an hour can also move when families move. What makes it a school is not the furniture — it is the routine: a register taken, a lesson planned, homework set. Children walk in as kids from a displacement site and sit down as students. You can watch the change happen in their posture.

The curriculum follows the national program as closely as conditions allow, concentrated on the core subjects — Arabic, mathematics, science, and English — so that when formal schooling resumes, our students can step back in rather than start over. Attendance is tracked daily, and our coordinators follow up personally on any child who stops coming. Sometimes the reason is illness; sometimes a family has moved; sometimes a child is needed for chores or queues. Each reason gets a different response, but every absence gets one.

The teachers who stayed teachers

Every one of our learning spaces is led by qualified teachers drawn from the displaced community itself. Ustadh Mahmoud, a math teacher with nearly twenty years of experience, now teaches three shifts a day in one of our northern spaces. He begins every class the same way he did in his old school — by greeting each student by name.

We provide teachers with a modest stipend, teaching materials, and training in psychosocially-informed education, because a classroom of displaced children needs more than a curriculum. It needs an adult who understands why a child might flinch at loud noises, or why another cannot concentrate because she is hungry, and who knows how to teach anyway, with patience and without shame.

A child who is learning is a child who believes there is a future. That is what we are really teaching — the future.

Learning kits: a school bag of one’s own

Alongside the classrooms, we distribute individual learning kits so that education continues at home — or in whatever place is currently called home. This quarter, our teams assembled and distributed 2,400 kits, each packed by volunteers and checked against a standard list.

Parents tell us the kits matter beyond their contents. A child who owns a notebook has somewhere to put her thoughts. A child who owns a school bag has a reason to get up in the morning. Ownership itself is part of the intervention.

We distribute kits through the learning spaces rather than in general queues, so that receiving one is bound to enrollment. It is a gentle nudge with real effect: at two of our sites, kit distribution weeks brought dozens of previously unenrolled children through the door — and most of them stayed after the bags were handed out. The pencils are the invitation. The classroom is the gift.

• Notebooks, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, and a ruler
• Age-appropriate reading and math workbooks
• Colored pencils and a drawing pad
• A durable school bag a child can be proud of

Catching up, not just keeping up

Many children arrive at our learning spaces significantly behind where their age suggests they should be — not because anything is wrong with them, but because everything has been wrong around them. Our teachers run structured catch-up modules in literacy and numeracy, assessing each child on arrival and tracking progress every month.

The results humble us. Children are astonishingly quick to recover lost ground when someone gives them a stable place to do it. Of the students in our catch-up cohorts for a full term, most advanced at least one grade level in reading. The capacity was never gone. It was waiting.

Just as important as the academic recovery is what teachers call the social one. Children in our spaces relearn how to be in a group of peers — how to share a table, wait a turn, work on a problem with a partner. For children whose worlds contracted to a single tent and a single family, a classroom is a rehearsal for the wider world coming back. Our education and psychosocial teams plan together for exactly this reason: the two recoveries happen in the same room.

How you can help a child stay a student

The mathematics of education support is quietly encouraging: a learning kit, a teacher’s stipend, mats and whiteboards — none of it is expensive, and all of it endures. Knowledge is the one form of aid that cannot be lost in the next displacement.

Your support this term funded 14 learning spaces, 1,800 enrolled children, and 2,400 kits in young hands. On behalf of every child who wrote their name on a fresh notebook this month — some for the first time in a year — thank you.