BEIRUT: It is often forgotten that schools are important not just for a traditional education that leads to a job, but also to help foster a child’s mental well-being, a subject that is often ignored or sidelined due to a lack of understanding. The Institute for Development Research Advocacy and Applied Care, is plunging headfirst into the sensitive issue to ensure Syrian and Lebanese students are given the tools they need to deal with the challenges facing Lebanon today.
The result was “Turning Teachers into Educators of Tolerance and Conflict Resolution,” an initiative which has been rolled out with 17 teachers from 13 different public schools across Lebanon, with the aim of reducing tension and violence, and increasing tolerance among more than 1,300 Syrian refugee and Lebanese students.
The initiative took place during the 2013-14 school year with 442 classroom sessions in grades four to seven, and is the result of a collaboration with the Education Ministry and funding from the U.S.
“The brain is highly vulnerable in the years of childhood and adolescence,” explained Elie Karam, IDRAAC’s president, at a conference Wednesday entitled “The Mind Does Not Forget,” where the results of the project were announced.
Providing the right environment for children to grow during these phases is vital because they “don’t forget the stresses at home and elsewhere,” he added.
The teachers, who were subjected to three training sessions before applying the acquired skills and activities with the students in classes, were chosen carefully.
“[The choice was] related to how psychologically minded they were, how popular they were with the children and how ready and motivated they themselves were to apply the program,” explained Caroline Cordahi Tabet, a child and adolescent clinical psychologist at St. Georges Hospital University Medical Center.
Over 13 weekly sessions, teachers were tasked with developing the students’ ability to cope with stress and limit their aggression toward one another using a schedule set by IDRAAC. In each session the students partook in a range of activities, including reading stories, building puzzles or learning breathing techniques for high-stress situations.
Communication skills, teamwork spirit and increasing tolerance were key.
The fact that most of the children targeted had not yet reached puberty made it easier for them to acquire these skills, the report noted, something which was noticeable in the project’s results.
Some 88 percent of the teachers believed the project improved various aspects of their students’ behavior, and all agreed it helped effect a positive change. Following the intervention session, teachers estimated that inter-student support increased from 2.9 percent to 42.4 percent.
Such an initiative is particularly important at the moment, as Lebanon struggles to cope with more than 1.2 million Syrian refugees and social tensions are on the rise.
“The project stems from a mission to disseminate information and programs related to mental health into communities who need it the most,” IDRAAC’s child and adolescent psychiatrist John Fayyad explained, adding that cases of conflict have been reported in private and public schools and between the host communities and the refugees and their families.
“The thing you want to do is to try to build skills among children to improve their ability to coexist with each other and to diminish the amount of tension.”
Speaking to The Daily Star ahead of the conference, Fayyad explained that planning such mental health interventions was a difficult task that required a lot of work.
“In this particular project we wanted to reach a very large number of students so we developed a program in which we trained teachers,” he said.
Although the ongoing Syrian crisis, the influx of refugees, and the various trauma and stress-related cases have taken up much of the news, such issues were not the only reason the organization had decided to take this step.
Fayyad explained that aggression had been apparent among Lebanese students even before the Syrian refugees starting coming to Lebanon.
“We’ve done these types of projects ... before the Syrian refugee crisis,” he explained. “These are types of skills that are needed for every type of child and in all types of settings.”
Before children become teenagers is the age at which they will take such skills seriously, Fayyad said.
“They are old enough to understand them, yet not old enough where they have [already] built a lot of bad habits,” he said, adding that it would be more difficult to break these new habits.
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