Rethinking Repair in Education in Emergencies

A guest blog written by Dr. Kelsey A. Dalrymple, Teaching Faculty in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

October 2025

The below draws from the recent 2025 article The Need for a Racial Reckoning in the Education in Emergencies Community: A Focus on Social and Emotional Learning published in Comparative Education review co-authored by Dr. Ritesh Shah and Dr. Kelsey A. Dalrymple.

In the field of Education in Emergencies (EiE), social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a central focus. It is often presented as a cure-all: a way to help children recover from trauma, build resilience, and prepare for brighter futures. On the surface, SEL seems like a no-brainer—it sounds positive, practical, and even essential. But when we pause to look more closely, the story becomes more complicated.

A Closer Look at SEL

The SEL framework promoted globally today has roots in the United States. Many of its early programs were designed with poor Black and Brown communities in mind (Comer, 1980; Cook & Laub, 1998; Prothrow-Stith & Weissman ,1991). These programs often carried deficit-based assumptions—focusing less on dismantling systemic inequalities and more on reshaping children’s behaviors to fit white, middle-class norms (Au, Brown & Calderón, 2016).

When these approaches are exported around the world—into refugee camps, conflict-affected schools, or disaster zones—they can carry those same biases. What looks like “help” may, in practice, reinforce racial and colonial hierarchies (Bian 2022; Bird & Schmid 2023). That raises a key question: when we talk about “repair” through SEL—and the EiE sector more broadly—what exactly are we repairing? And who decides what repair should look like?

Beyond Quick Fixes

In EiE, repair is often defined in narrow terms: rebuilding damaged schools, fixing broken systems, or restoring children’s psychological well-being. These are important goals, but they don’t go far enough. True repair must grapple with harder questions: What historical and structural forces—like colonialism, racism, displacement, and dispossession—created these crises? And how do education programs, even well-intentioned ones, risk reproducing them (Novelli & Kutan, 2023; Oddy, 2023)?

If we take repair seriously, it becomes about more than technical fixes. It’s about rethinking education as a space for justice, not just service delivery. One way to do this is by considering three dimensions of repair: material, epistemic, and pedagogic (Sriprakash, 2023). Together, they push us to reimagine what education could be in times of crisis.

Material Repair: Shifting Resources and Power

Material repair is about redistributing resources and power. Too often, humanitarian education is donor-driven, designed and controlled by institutions in the Minority World. Funding structures reinforce dependency, keeping local actors on the margins (Alalami, 2019; Carney & Klerides, 2020). These systems can trap communities in cycles of reliance rather than enabling long-term autonomy.

Repair, in this sense, means restructuring systems so that affected communities have the authority, resources, and stability to lead their own educational futures. This requires shifting decision-making to those directly impacted and holding international actors accountable for inequities they perpetuate. Without material repair, education risks becoming a revolving door of short-term projects rather than a foundation for sustainable futures.

Epistemic Repair: Valuing Local Knowledge

Epistemic repair focuses on whose knowledge counts. Around the world, communities have their own practices for supporting children through trauma and uncertainty—through rituals, stories, languages, and collective care. These are not “extras” or “cultural add-ons”; they are robust systems of well-being (Brush et al., 2022; Bryan, 2022). Yet global SEL programs often sideline or erase them in favor of standardized, imported curricula.

Ignoring local wisdom is a form of harm. It communicates that the only valid ways of supporting children are those developed elsewhere, often by outsiders. Epistemic repair requires reversing that logic by respecting, amplifying, and learning from practices communities already use. When we broaden the vision of what EiE can be, we move closer to repair that is inclusive and responsive.

Pedagogic Repair: Rethinking Our Roles

Pedagogic repair asks us to turn the lens back on ourselves as educators, researchers, and practitioners. It asks: how are we, and the institutions we represent, part of the systems that maintain inequality? And how can we engage communities not as passive recipients of expertise, but as co-creators of their own futures (Love, 2019; Camangian & Cariaga, 2021)?

This dimension of repair calls for humility. It means moving from “capacity building” to solidarity—recognizing that communities are not broken vessels to be fixed, but active agents of their own survival and resilience. Repair is not a neat process of restoring order; it’s an ongoing practice of reckoning, learning, and transformation.

What Repair Looks Like in Practice

We don’t have to imagine this work in the abstract—examples already exist. Indigenous and community-driven education movements across the world provide powerful models. In Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori-led initiatives have rooted education in cultural survival, language revitalization, and collective resilience (Fickel et al., 2023). In North America, Indigenous education movements reclaim traditions that sustain communities in the face of colonial erasure (Sun et al., 2022).

In Palestine, the concept of sumud—steadfastness—embodies resilience not as a set of skills delivered by NGOs, but as lived practices of refusal, persistence, and solidarity under conditions of ongoing injustice (Pallister-Wilkins, 2021; Reid, 2010). These examples show us that repair is not about imposing external solutions, but about nurturing the strengths and ways of knowing already present within communities. They remind us that education is never neutral—it can either reinforce inequities or challenge them.

Repair as Imagination

At its core, repair in EiE requires imagination. It asks us to look beyond savior narratives that cast international actors as rescuers of traumatized children. Instead, it calls us to recognize the everyday acts of care already carried out by parents, teachers, and communities—even in the harshest conditions (Dalrymple & Irankunda, forthcoming).

Repair is not about returning to “normal.” For many, “normal” was already defined by inequality and marginalization. Repair is about imagining just futures—futures where education is not just about surviving crises but about addressing the root causes that make some communities perpetually more vulnerable. This requires bold thinking and the courage to challenge existing power structures.

This vision of repair challenges us to think big. What would it look like if education systems were designed not simply to manage crises, but to dismantle the inequities that fuel them? What if, instead of measuring success by the number of programs delivered, we measured it by the degree to which power and resources were shared more equitably? These are difficult but necessary questions if we want education to be truly transformative.

A Call to Action

As educators, practitioners, and policymakers, we face a choice. We can cling to narrow models of repair, reproducing the very harms we claim to address. Or we can embrace the harder, transformative work of reckoning with history, redistributing power, and creating education that is rooted in justice. This choice has real consequences for the futures of children and communities in crisis.

This is not work that any one individual or institution can accomplish alone. Repair in EiE must be collective, ongoing, and grounded in solidarity with those whose lives and futures are most affected. It requires courage, humility, and a willingness to imagine otherwise. Only then can we begin to see education not as a tool of assimilation or pacification, but as a practice of justice and reparation. And only then can we truly claim to be engaged in the work of repair.

References

Alalami, N. (2019). Evidence for Education in Emergencies: Who Decides and Why It Matters. Forced Migration Review, 60:76–77.

Au, W., Brown, A. & Calderón, D. (2016). Reclaiming the Multicultural Roots of US Curriculum: Communities of Color and Official Knowledge in Education. Teachers College Press.

Bian, J. (2022).The Racialization of Expertise and Professional Non-Equivalence in the Humanitarian Workplace. Journal of International Humanitarian Action, 7:3. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-021-00112-9.

Bird, G. & Schmid, D. (2023).“Humanitarianism and the ‘Migration Fix’: On the Implication of NGOs in Racial Capitalism and the Management of Relative Surplus Populations.” Geopolitics, 28 (3):1235–61. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.2008361.

Brush, K., Jones, S.M., Bailey, R., Nelson, B., Raisch, N., & Meland, E. (2022). Social and Emotional Learning: From Conceptualization to Practical Application in a Global Context. In Life Skills Education for Youth: Young People and Learning Processes in School and Everyday Life, ed. DeJaeghere, J. & Murphy-Graham, E. Springer. https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85214-6_3.

Bryan, A. (2022). From‘the Conscience of Humanity’ to the Conscious Human Brain: UNESCO’s Embrace of Social-Emotional Learning as a Flag of Convenience. Compare, 54 (5): 770–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2022.2129956.

Dalrymple, K. A. & Irankunda, E. (Forthcoming).”My Child Belongs to the NGOs”: Social Emotional Learning as a Racialized, Neoliberal Project in a Refugee Context. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education.

Camangian, P. &Cariaga, S. (2021). Social and Emotional Learning Is Hegemonic Miseducation: Students Deserve Humanization Instead. Race Ethnicity and Education, 25 (7): 901–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2020.1798374.

Carney, S. & Klerides, E. (2020). Governance and the Evolving Global Education Order. European Education, 52 (2): 81–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/10564934.2020.1769308.

Comer, J. P. (1980). School Power: Implications of an Intervention Project. Free Press.

Cook, P. & Laub, J. 1998. The Unprecedented Epidemic in Youth Violence. Crime and Justice, 24:27–64. https://doi.org/10.1086/449277.

Fickel, L., Denston, A., Mrtin, R. & O’Toole, V. (2023). Co-constructing a culturally and linguistically sustaining Te Tiriti–based Ako framework for socio-emotional wellbeing in education. Teaching & Learning Research Initiative. University of Canterbury.

Love, B. (2019). We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Beacon.

Novelli, M. & Kutan, B. (2023). The Imperial Entanglements of‘Education in Emergencies’: From Saving Souls to Saving Schools? Globalisation, Societies and Education, 22 (3): 405–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2023.2236566.

Oddy, J. (2023). Retelling Education in Emergencies Through the Black Radical Tradition: On Racial Capitalism, Critical Race Theory and Fugitivity. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 22 (3):446–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2023.2272740.

Pallister-Wilkins, P. (2021). Saving the Souls of White Folk: Humanitarianism as White Supremacy. Security Dialogue, 52 (S): 98–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/09670106211024419.

Prothrow-Stith, D. & Weissman, M. (1991). Deadly Consequences. HarperCollins.

Reid, J. (2010). The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies. Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4 (4):391–411. https://doi.org/10.1080/17502971003700985.

Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising Just Futures of Education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44 (5): 782–95. https://doi.org/10.1080 /01596306.2022.2144141.

Sun, J., Goforth, A., Nichols, L., Violante, A., Christopher, K., Howlett, R., Hogenson, D., & Graham, N. (2022). Building a space to dream: Supporting indigenous children’s survivance through community-engaged social and emotional learning. Child Development, 93: 699-716. DOI:10.1111/cdev.13786

Guest contributions to the Repair-Ed blog represent the perspectives of the authors.