This book has presented key results from the four Building Resilience in Crisis through Education (BRiCE) research studies, each emphasizing the specific challenges that teachers, learners, and education systems face in crises, their specific contextual realities, and the ways in which teachers, learners, and other actors develop resilience in the face of these crises. Each chapter builds on research carried out over multiple years in several contexts in Sub-Saharan Africa, leveraging the longitudinal, comparative, and mixed-methods approaches deployed by the studies to provide an in-depth and nuanced picture of how teachers and learners deal with crises. In this chapter, we reflect on the common themes and arguments that have emerged across the chapters, and draw out their implications for practice, policy, and research.

The book emphasizes the crucial role that teachers, school staff, learners, and school communities play in the resilience of education systems during crisis, and the importance of supporting teachers and educators in their critical tasks of equipping the next generation. The studies beg for caution and careful reflection on the role that education can play in relation to contemporary crises. In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on the transformative role that education can play in addressing the underlying causes of armed conflict, political division, and displacement (Pigozzi, 1999; INEE, 2010), or more recently, about the key role of education in relation to climate change (Roussel et al, 2020). While education undeniably has a role to play, the studies in this book have shown that learners, educators, and school communities already face extremely difficult living and working conditions, and should not be expected to take on the sole responsibility of dealing with complex crises whose causes and resolution are political. Much more can be done, however, to support teachers and learners who deploy tremendous efforts to continue teaching and learning amidst adversity. Humility and reflexivity are critical when discussing and assessing what can be done. The studies presented in this book were produced through funding and project configurations that are also influenced by material, professional, and epistemic inequalities that characterize much research on crisis-affected contexts and international partnerships. We contend that any effort to understand and support learners and teachers in crisis-affected contexts should centre their perspectives, something we have sought to do so in these studies, while also recognizing the difficulties that often accompany this process.