By Jill Davidson

"Survival education" radically transforms people who have been historically denied the advantages of schooling. It is a form of intellectual and psychological armor developed by social entrepreneurs to empower learners with immediately relevant skills.

Through survival education, students redirect their own lives and help their families, neighbors and societies exercise new and better options. As a tool for claiming human rights, survival education is especially relevant to communities that face political repression, economic devastation or other tragedies.

This issue of Changemakers.net Journal will present three examples of social entrepreneurs' survival education programs that infuse learning with safety, powerful personal connections and relevant skill-building. These innovators pay close attention to participants' emotional and physical safety, focus on building strong relationships based on shared culture within learning communities, and emphasize immediately relevant skill-building as a path to higher-order learning and literacy.

In Nepal, Stella Tamang works with girls who have been reduced to desperation by the demands of child labor, economic privation and frequent sexual servitude. She has found ways for the girls to attend school, generate crucial incomes for their families, and identify future work and education options.

While enrolled in an 18-month program, some of the girls provide childcare to local mothers who work and have no other source of childcare for their infants and toddlers. Others trade expertise in weaving and other crafts with fellow students or learn the basics of operating a small business.

To reduce stress and violence in the lives of troubled students, Mary Gordon's Roots of Empathy program brings parents and their small babies into Canadian classrooms, brilliantly creating an ongoing curriculum that revolves around both family relationships and the bonds students form with classroom visitors. They learn what they need most in their lives: human connection, love, and empathy and how to use relationship-building skills to avoid violence in their own lives – now and in the future.

Most children from Sudarno's politically ostracized home village Bingkat, Indonesia have experienced school as a rigid, oppressive and inaccessible institution. By founding a middle school and later a high school, Sudarno has transformed this situation into real learning and connection. He has personalized relationships by allowing longer class discussions.

Students learn useful, sustainable skills such as organic farming techniques. They often learn outside the traditional classroom, where they discover possibilities for learning and service in their communities. This "school without walls" approach helps them make a personal connection with their communities and see that there is a productive role for them in their societies.

Creating Safe Spaces for Learning

The Urban Promise Academy is a new, small, autonomous middle school in Oakland, California that was built for students from a long-underserved urban neighborhood. David Montes de Oca, a teacher, visionary and leading force for change in the community, argues that his school's first job is to create a fear-free environment.

"Our first priority is to develop a safe space do whatever's necessary for our students to realize their education," Montes de Oca said. "As we planned this school, we studied the brain research that describes how your brain is activated when you're afraid and how the same part of your brain is also necessary to learn.

"Our very origins require every capacity to be available, because if I am going to fight or flee, I have to be able to draw on everything I need to respond. Those resources are busy if you're scared while you're trying to learn. When a teacher is in front of a classroom, you're busy being afraid and it doesn't work."

Before a student's mind is free to make connections and learn, the student must be safe from threats of violence and imprisonment, sexual victimization, political discrimination, lack of opportunity, and the worst ravages of poverty. ¹ Fear-free environments allow students to use their brains' full power, unencumbered by the distraction of fright, notes Montes de Oca.

Learners' immediate needs for food, shelter, and personal security must be satisfied to create this atmosphere of safety. Their emotional need for human connection also must be satisfied through strong, sustained personal relationships with each other, their teachers, and their communities. When both these components of physical and psychological safety are in place, life-altering learning can begin.

Personal, Culturally-Centered Connection

Effective education can break through patterns of destruction and neglect in the lives of children families, and communities in the troubled regions of the world. School-family connections that provide crucial emotional support to learners – who would otherwise live without fully sustaining family and community structures – are created by establishing foster parent programs, bringing down language barriers, changing historically damning curriculum that might otherwise turn children against parents, and by inviting parents and families into the schools. When economic and political pressures pull families apart, survival education provides an emotional framework for learning and growth.

Students at Julia C. Frazier Elementary School in Dallas, Texas outperform their suburban peers on statewide, standardized tests, according to a recent report by The Dallas Morning News. The school serves a non-white population of economically disadvantaged students, nearly all of whom are African-American.

Frazier's students adopt their teachers' last names while in the school building. This effectively identifies them as part of a family at school. Leslie City, a third-grade teacher, is quoted saying, "We treat them like our own kids. We tell them, 'From 8 to 3, your last name is City. I'm your mama. I'll love you and teach you and protect you. At the end of the day, you can get your last name back.' " Frazier Elementary School teachers and students believe that this association of home, safety, love, and caring inside the school opens minds and hearts to previously unimagined success.

But love, however well-intentioned, may not be sufficient. Educators also must have a deeper personal connection to their students. In Other People's Children, a seminal book on the role of culture in education, Lisa Delpit observes, "Appropriate education for poor children and children of color can only be devised in consultation with adults who share their culture."

Educators can increase students' commitment to education and attachment to their teachers by working closely with people who share the same background and are close to their hearts, by intimately understanding how students' social circumstances may have hampered their emotional and intellectual growth, and by finding creative ways to meet their most pressing needs for financial security and personal safety.

Relevant Knowledge

Survival education places value on practical, relevant knowledge. Life experience serves as curriculum; students learn skills while providing help and service. Like all authentic learning experiences, it is tailored to the particular needs and environments of students.

Survival education evokes aspects of service learning, a powerful concept in experiential education worldwide. Learning In Deed, an initiative launched in 1998 by the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, defines service learning as "a teaching method that combines meaningful service to the community with curriculum-based learning. Critical to this type of learning is building in time for students to reflect on their service experience. Reflection time helps students make the connection between classroom and community learning, and ensures they understand the extent to which they can impact positive change."

Service learning allows literacy skills and higher order thinking to develop during the time allotted for reflection. At the same time, it emphasizes knowledge that students can use immediately to earn income in order to help support themselves and their families. It transforms learners into teachers who have information, habits of mind, and skills that they can take back into their communities. This creates a ripple effect that multiplies the impact of the program.

Challenge of Growth: How to Reach More People?

Educational entrepreneurs feel the pressure to expand their programs and bring empowerment through education to more children - ideally, many more. But to what extent can effective survival education programs be expanded? Stories of the achievements of particular students and educational programs are compelling, but a reasonable skeptic may inquire how educational efforts that are intensely local – necessarily grounded in the needs of a particular culture and place and fueled by the efforts of highly motivated, energetic and indispensable leaders – can be expanded into more communities.

A reasonable optimist might respond by saying it's important to begin with the place-based, student-centered methods of proven educational programs, but then other educators must be encouraged to innovate by using their own contexts and connections to create additional programs. It is possible to empower students through education in the face of violence, political oppression, economic despair, and sexual predation when students have the time, space and skills to build relationships with their communities and with their authentic selves.

Just as no two learners are alike, no two educational programs should be exactly alike – they need to vary widely depending on what their participants need to survive and thrive. Programs that are based on principles have a much better chance of helping transform the lives of their students than programs that follow models in lockstep.

Survival education programs that hope to spark changes similar to those generated by the social entrepreneurs featured here should pay attention to their participants' emotional and physical safety, focus on building strong relationships based on shared culture within their learning communities, and emphasize immediately relevant skill-building as a path to higher order learning and literacy. These principles form a foundation that individual educational leaders can adapt to meet their local needs.

Regardless of how successfully survival education programs expand, the happiness and personal transformations of participants in current programs leaves no doubt that their founders are heading down the right paths. In an essay in her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver describes visiting a farm in Mexico that switched happily and profitably to organic farming practices – or, rather, resumed those long-practiced methods after a detour into modern chemical-driven agriculture.

Kingsolver describes a farmer – also a mother – saying, "It's nicer, more interesting. Our kids like it better. That's how you know a change is going to stick." Transforming learners' expectations of how the world works is the sanest and most effective route to inculcating more widespread societal change.