Learning lessons from wartime education projects in South Sudan

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In South Sudan's civil wars since the 1960s, millions have died or suffered in internecine violence, famines, and flight. Renewed conflict since 2013, only two years after national independence, has displaced over four million people. Most people continue to struggle against mass unemployment, military recruitment, and few educational options. Today, the formal schools, buildings, and education programmes established during a short peace in 2005-2013 are again threatened or destroyed by war, economic collapse, and displacement. South Sudanese people fear the loss of another generation.South Sudan's endemic conflicts and structural instability pose a major challenge to education policy-makers, formal sector practitioners, scholars, and national activists. The network is driven by the belief that a new approach needs to be rooted in the realities of the community's own educational work amidst chronic insecurity since the 1960s. This leads us to two key questions:1. How have South Sudanese people pursued their own informal and self-funded educational projects over the last sixty years of civil wars? 2. How can this history of community education during war and displacement inform education delivery, curricula, and pedagogy in chronic crisis?The network focuses a hidden resource to answer these questions. Over three generations of conflict, displacement, and collapsed formal government, South Sudanese communities have organised their own educational projects and home-made textbooks in refugee camps and rebel-held territories. These often self-taught teachers and their supporters have worked with highly traumatised, displaced communities, with combatants or ex-combatants, filling gaps in educational provision and working in remote, inaccessible, highly mobile and/or violent settings. These men and women, and their communities and personal archives, hold an unexploited wealth of knowledge about managing and promoting education and intellectual cultures in war. The main goal of the network is to built a new academic and practitioner community centred on these local experts. The network will bring together around 30 local organisations and teachers from across South Sudan and neighbouring refugee camps in Uganda with the policy and academic community, to share knowledge and ideas as peers: the network includes the South Sudan Council of Churches, the South Sudan Women's Empowerment Network, members of major schools including Issa Girls, the British Council, and academics across South Sudan and the UK.Through three transnational consultations across multi-ethnic, multi-lingual communities divided by conflict - contingent on risks and emergent opportunities - the network will draw out hidden community educational histories, projects, and strategies for teaching during conflict and displacement. This is the first project of its kind to bridge the divide between scholars, policymakers, and community activists in South Sudan.The network consultations and database of partners and translated resources will provide new sources and collaborators for curriculum and education programme development; new approaches to methods of education in mobile and extreme circumstances; new ideas for innovative and community-led provisions for marginalised, disabled, combatant, and adult learners; and contextualised, locally-rooted definitions of quality and excellence. These uncovered histories of community educational activism, and resulting possibilities for new education agendas, will be circulated through open academic, policy, and media platforms and an accessible, translated briefing to reach the widest possible audience in South Sudan and internationally. The network will address both immediate planning and reform agendas, and longer-term routes to community reconstruction and reconciliation rooted in shared community intellectual and educational histories.