Introduction

Global education policies, frameworks, and research increasingly recognize holistic outcomes, including well-being and resilience, as central to quality education (UNESCO, 2020; Kim et al, 2022). This is particularly true in contexts affected by conflict where research suggests that education can protect the well-being and resilience of children and youth (Nicolai and Triplehorn, 2003; McBrien, 2021). Education in Emergencies (EiE) scholarship has explored how education can contribute to learner well-being, how relationships with trusted adults – such as teachers – can support resilience, how well-being and resilience affect learning, and more recently, how complex crises influence teachers’ well-being and teaching practice (Betancourt and Khan, 2008; Gould et al, 2013; Wolf et al, 2015; Fayyad et al, 2017; Al-Rousan et al, 2018; Mendenhall et al, 2021; D’Sa et al, 2023). Despite this growing evidence base, there remains a dearth of studies that investigate learner and teacher well-being together as well as how learners and teachers conceptualize well-being and resilience for themselves. In efforts to generalize globally, opportunities to examine context-specific factors and develop context-specific frameworks are also neglected.

Focusing on South Sudan and Uganda, as part of a wider project implementation consortium led by Oxfam Denmark, the Building Resilience in Crisis through Education research team led by Teachers College, Columbia University conducted a cross-border, mixed-methods study between 2018 and 2022 to understand the factors that influence the well-being and resilience of learners and teachers in accelerated education programmes (AEPs) in northern Uganda and South Sudan. We asked two overarching research questions:

• • What are the most salient aspects of well-being for teachers and learners?

• • In what ways do teacher well-being and student well-being interact with one another and with the broader community?

Prioritizing the perspectives and experiences of accelerated education (AE) learners and teachers, we developed and applied a conceptual framework for understanding well-being and resilience that can inform practice, policy, and research in contexts affected by conflict and forced displacement, which we present in this chapter.

Uganda and South Sudan are important locations to study well-being and resilience in contexts affected by protracted conflict and forced displacement.