Navigating Displacement: Challenges and Adaptation Strategies of Teachers in Schools for Internally Displaced Youth

Leading team:

• Dr. Nadav Ehrenfeld
• Dr. Nadav Marco
• Prof. Tal Gilead

Project team:

• Dr. Yael Nurick
• Leah Kurzweil

Brief

Tens of millions are displaced from their homes globally each year due to extreme weather disasters (such as floods, storms, and wildfires) or due to conflicts and violence (such as the October 7 war).

Among other consequences for the youth, displacements involve disruption of schooling.

In response, alternative schooling configurations aim at providing young students with crucial academic, social, and emotional support.

Given the global expected rise in risk of internal displacements, and given the complexity of teaching and learning in these situations, we investigate adaptation strategies aimed at providing continuous education for internally displaced youth.
 

We ask: What challenges do teachers of displaced students face, how do they respond to these challenges, and how are these teachers being supported professionally?
 

Empirically, we ground our proposal in the context of the Israeli school system amidst the mass displacement of October 7, 2023, when due to the regional war, populations from the southern and northern borders transitioned for security reasons to other parts of the country.

Methodologically, we interview teachers within three institutional configurations:

1. provisional schools designed to provide immediate short-term support;
2. public schools who received displaced students into their institution;
3. original schools of displaced students during their re-opening period.

This work is supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) at the Weizmann Institute of Science (2024-P147625)

Further readings:

Marco, N., Gilead, T., Ehrenfeld, N., & Nurik, Y. (2025). Teachers in provisional schools for displaced students: Navigating challenges, autonomy, and responses. Teaching and Teacher Education, 154, 104868. 
 

Ehrenfeld, N., Marco, N., Gilead, T., Nurik, Y., & Kurzweil, L. (2025). “Push forward and we will help”: Teacher autonomy and system support in the context of teaching displaced students. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (pp. 1314–1318). Helsinki, Finland. 
 

Gilead, T., Marco, N., Ehrenfeld, N., & Nurik, Y. (2024). Creating order in chaotic environments: Teacher’s coping strategies in provisional schools. European Conference on Educational Research (ECER 2024). Nicosia, Cyprus.