Conference Agenda

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 accelerated war-related migration across Europe and placed host education systems under exceptional pressure to provide equitable schooling for conflict-affected children. By late 2025, millions of Ukrainian citizens had been granted temporary protection within the EU, with the Czech Republic hosting a disproportionately high share (Eurostat, 2025). Ensuring access to education for refugee pupils aligns with international commitments to inclusive schooling (UNESCO, 2020) and with rights-based approaches emphasising availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability. Yet research consistently demonstrates a gap between the declarative ambitions of inclusive policy and its everyday enactment (Ainscow, 2020; Slee, 2018, 2019).

To conceptualise this tension, we distinguish analytically between adaptation, integration, and inclusion. Adaptation represents the initial adjustment to a new educational environment across psychological, sociocultural, and academic dimensions (Berry, 1997; Ward, 2022; Cortazzi & Jin, 1997; Zhou et al., 2008). Schools frequently prioritise safety and belonging; however, sidelining academic expectations may reproduce inequalities and institutionalise deficit perspectives (Nilsson & Bunar, 2015; Rubie-Davies & Hattie, 2024; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). In the Czech context, adaptation strategies have often foregrounded psychosocial stability while leaving academic integration underdeveloped (Šeďová et al., 2025).

Integration refers to the incorporation of pupils with a different mother tongue (DMT) into mainstream schooling through targeted supports, particularly language provision. Its success depends on systemic flexibility and equity-oriented policies (European Commission, 2021). However, language-focused measures alone may address only the surface level of participation while leaving structural inequalities intact (Hassani & Schwab, 2025). Evidence from Czech schools suggests that support remains uneven and frequently reliant on project-based funding rather than systemic entitlement (Mikešová et al., 2024), reinforcing broader European patterns of categorical inequality (Hadjar et al., 2025).

Inclusion represents the most demanding approach, requiring the transformation of school culture so that diversity becomes a constitutive feature of the learning community (Booth & Ainscow, 2011; Ainscow et al., 2019). Yet legislative reforms may create an illusion of inclusivity while exclusionary practices persist (Slee, 2018). Inclusion must therefore be understood not merely as placement but as full participation and recognition within the educational process (Göransson & Nilholm, 2014).

The war on Gaza has produced a humanitarian catastrophe with devastating consequences for education. Schools, universities, students, teachers, and researchers have been systematically targeted or rendered nonfunctional through bombardment, displacement, and siege conditions. International organizations and scholars increasingly describe this pattern as “educide” or “scholasticide”: the destruction of educational infrastructure and intellectual life that undermines cultural continuity and future capacity for recovery (Alousi, 2022; Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2024). United Nations findings suggest these attacks are deliberate and part of a strategy that undermines Gaza’s social, cultural, and institutional life (United Nations Human Rights Council [UNHRC], 2025).

Available evidence documents extensive damage across primary, secondary, and higher education, including attacks on school buildings used as civilian shelters and the killing and injury of students and educators (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs [OCHA oPt], 2025; UNHRC, 2025). Also, in the West Bank, students and teachers have been killed, detained, and subjected to repression, eroding educational access and academic freedom (Ministry of Education and Higher Education [MoEHE], 2025). Educational disruption has further intensified following legislative measures restricting United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)’s operations in East Jerusalem (UNRWA, 2025).

In this context, three research questions are posed: How are attacks on education in Gaza and the West Bank structured? How do these practices relate to international legal and normative frameworks protecting education during armed conflict? What reconstruction and protection strategies can sustain education under prolonged crisis?

To address these questions, the paper synthesizes documentary and secondary sources with three objectives. First, it systematically characterizes the scope and forms of attacks on education, including physical destruction, institutional disruption, and impacts on students and educators. Second, it situates these practices within international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and global commitments to safeguarding education (Fourth Geneva Convention, 1949, Art. 50; United Nations, 1989; Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack [GCPEA], 2015). Third, it proposes a reconstruction and protection agenda organized around five priority domains based on existing literature.

The theoretical and normative framework combines the concepts of educide and scholasticide with critical, decolonial perspectives on education under occupation, linking empirical documentation to legal and ethical evaluation (Alousi, 2022; OHCHR, 2024; UNHRC, 2025). Documentary synthesis highlights the epistemic consequences of attack damaged campuses, lost archives, and disrupted research that undermine both immediate learning and long-term professional capacity (Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, Centre for Lebanese Studies, & UNRWA, 2026; OCHA oPt, 2025; UNHRC, 2025). Building on this analysis, this study outlines practical actions grouped into key areas: (1) operational support through remote teaching and digital systems designed for limited connectivity; (2) institutional solidarity via partnerships, scholarships, and emergency funding; (3) research and advocacy reorientation toward reparative, community-centered knowledge production; (4) political pressure to defend academic freedom and enable accountability; and (5) community-based problem solving grounded in local priorities.

The paper argues that preserving education requires simultaneous operational, institutional, political, and community-level action. Violations of obligations requiring occupying powers to facilitate education and protect children’s right to education constitute breaches of international law and severe setbacks to the Sustainable Development Goals (e.g., Hassoun et al., 2025). The paper advances practical interventions, including mobile learning spaces, institutional twinning, collaborative research on reconstruction and trauma, coordinated academic advocacy, and community-led initiatives (e.g., Buheji, 2025; Efendi & Arafeh, 2024; Gordon & Turner, 2024) and emphasizes the centrality of local agency. Sustained international collaboration is essential for effective implementation. Accordingly, education systems are most sustainable when local communities are active decision-makers with meaningful control over priorities, implementation and governance (UN General Assembly, 2015).

In the current global landscape, educational systems are increasingly shaped by conditions of crisis and instability. Health emergencies, armed conflicts, environmental disasters, economic precarity, and social inequalities intersect and redefine the daily functioning of schools, challenging traditional assumptions about teaching, learning, and institutional stability. Within European and international policy agendas, education is progressively framed as a key lever for resilience, social cohesion, and democratic continuity, particularly in contexts of emergency. However, educational responses to crisis often remain grounded in short-term, alarmist, and compensatory approaches, focused primarily on damage control rather than on long-term pedagogical transformation.

This study addresses the topic of education in emergencies by proposing a conceptual shift from an alarmist to a transformative understanding of emergency. The central research question is:

How do primary school teachers interpret and experience educational emergencies, and in what ways can their practices contribute to rethinking emergency as a generative and transformative pedagogical condition?

Closely connected to this main question are two subsidiary questions:

How do teachers make sense of emergency in their professional lives, emotionally, pedagogically, and institutionally?

What similarities and differences emerge across diverse socio-cultural contexts, and what can these differences reveal about the role of teacher education and school systems in responding to crisis?

The objective of the study is threefold. First, it aims to explore teachers’ meanings, emotions, and practices related to educational emergencies, foregrounding their lived experiences rather than institutional narratives alone. Second, it seeks to compare these experiences across two contrasting yet interconnected contexts, Italy and Sierra Leone, in order to highlight both context-specific challenges and transnational patterns. Third, the study aims to contribute to the development of a transformative pedagogical framework for education in emergencies, with particular attention to teacher education as a strategic site for systemic change.

The conceptual and theoretical framework integrates several complementary perspectives. At its core lies pedagogy of emergency, which conceptualises emergency not as a punctual and exceptional event, but as a multidimensional and processual condition affecting individuals, communities, and institutions over time. This perspective allows emergency to be understood as structurally embedded within educational systems, rather than external to them.

This framework is further informed by critical pedagogy, particularly the notions of dialogue, conscientisation, and agency. From this viewpoint, education is not limited to adaptation to crisis but becomes a space in which teachers and learners can critically interpret reality and act upon it. Emergency thus becomes a potential site of pedagogical meaning-making and transformation.

A third key component is the transformative model of emergency, which contrasts with alarmist approaches that prioritise immediacy, control, and procedural responses. The transformative model emphasises anticipation, reflexivity, and the generative potential of crisis, highlighting how educational actors can influence not only the effects but also the interpretation and pedagogical use of emergency situations.

Adopting a comparative and intercultural perspective, the study situates Italian and Sierra Leonean primary schools within broader European and global educational dynamics. While these contexts differ significantly in terms of resources, institutional structures, and policy frameworks, they are both shaped by global inequalities and shared vulnerabilities. This comparison enables a deeper understanding of emergency as a transnational educational condition and opens space for mutual learning between European and non-European contexts.

By foregrounding teachers’ voices and practices, the study contributes to European and international debates on education in emergencies, resilience, and teacher education. It argues that sustainable and just responses to crisis require moving beyond emergency management toward pedagogical transformation, supported by coherent policies, professional recognition, and long-term investment in teacher education.

This paper aims in contributing to the improvement of the ways behavioral difficulties may be interpreted, by highlighting the complexity of the social context relating to them, including the family context, the school context and the wider educational context.

Incidents of behavioral difficulties have increased in recent decades and are often linked to a lack of school readiness or to deficiencies in children’s self-regulatory skills (Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta & Cox, 2001). The result is the formation of a school and family daily life dominated by conflicts. Children with behavioral difficulties are often targeted and marginalized (Butler, 2023).

Researching adult beliefs about children's behavioral difficulties is crucial because these beliefs can shape adult attitudes and behavior, influencing both their relationship with children, as well as children's behavior. In the interpretation of behavioral difficulties, emphasis is often placed on the behavior itself and its modification to conform to social expectations (Butler, 2022). According to Greene (2023) behavioral difficulty is nothing more than a child's communication code when they lack the basic skills needed to meet social expectations. This explanation is an interpretation that calls on adults to look beyond their behavior, by asking them to decode it.

Beliefs surrounding behavioral difficulties view behavior as an inherent characteristic of the child and overlook the broader social context within which the child develops. Ecosystemic theory, by placing behavior within the broader system where it occurs, interprets it in relation to it (Vygotsky, 1978). In this sense, behavioral difficulty is a reflection of the dysfunction of these systems. Related to the aforementioned is Polyvagal Theory, which interprets behavioral difficulties as a reaction to unconscious motivations stemming from either a school or family environment (Butler, 2023). In addition, chaos theory in education enriches the interpretations of behavioral difficulties by emphasizing the complexity of these systems (Akamas & Kantal, 2019). Finally, feminist theory highlights the position of both mothers, who are considered primarily responsible for raising children in the Greek setting, and teachers, who are predominantly women (Vogt, 2008).

The selection of the above theories is an attempt to interpret behaviors from angles beyond the medical model of disability, with the ambition that the change in their interpretive paradigm may alter how we relate to them and how we can meaningfully act.

In this context, the purpose of this qualitative research was to investigate teachers' and parents’ attitudes/opinions/beliefs regarding children with behavioral difficulties in the Greek setting. The main research tool was semi-structured interviews with twelve participants. Thematic analysis of research data revealed that new beliefs, related to efforts to understand children, seem to coexist with parochial views, which denote a form of inadequacy within the child.

However, it is argued that behavioral ‘problems’ may be seen not as problems but as an opportunity for further reflection and taking core action through our understanding of their root cause. More specifically, behavior is often understood by participants as intentional and impenetrable and based on their descriptions, causes conflicts, during which adults end up defending themselves through survival mechanisms (e.g. yelling), just like children themselves. Therefore, through the adults’ narratives, we see the mirroring of the very concept of behavioral difficulties, in their own behaviors. Beneath the conflictual relationship with the child, their yelling is a call for help - as is often for children themselves - but behind the mask of anger, they often describe a feeling of fear as the root cause.

It is suggested that the utilization of this mirroring mechanism in teachers’ and parents’ training courses is a powerful tool for looking beyond certain child behaviors, leading to benefits for both teachers/parents and children in terms of their mutual understanding.