JEiE Behind the Pages

JEiE Behind the Pages is the podcast of the Journal on Education in Emergencies, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal set up by the Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies and housed at New York University. The journal publishes scholarly and practitioner work on education in countries and regions affected by crisis, conflict and environmental disaster. The podcast gives its authors the microphone. Nathan Thompson hosts, Gabrielle Galanek produces, and Porticus is named as the season's supporter. A run of episodes is built around the journal's special issue on education in pandemics. The map is wide: Syria and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the US and Lebanon, Rwanda and Honduras, South Sudan and Northern Nigeria. The format never changes. Thompson talks with the authors of one article, asks for the practical detail behind the findings, and closes by sending listeners to the paper itself. His questions are plain ones. Who did the program reach, how were parents brought in, and what conditions were teachers working and being paid under? In the Syria and Democratic Republic of Congo episode, a guest describes a free education policy that was never properly funded and ran into COVID, leaving students to drop out and, in some areas, to become potential targets for armed groups. The distance-learning conversation on the US and Lebanon turns to a program for children from kindergarten through grade two. Its idea of family was broad enough to include grandparents and nannies, and its fieldwork interns were in-service teachers working toward certification. The South Sudan episode stays with teenage mothers and pregnant girls who lost the things that had kept them going, from seeing friends to attending school. Many talked about starting small businesses such as selling firewood or tea, and about rearranging their days to fit chores, children and study. In the Rwanda and Honduras episode, guests discuss Asegurando la Educación, a USAID-funded school-based violence prevention project that moved away from punitive, policing-style approaches and toward social and emotional learning. One guest sums up the case in a line: 'if you're sad or you're mad, you can't add.' On Northern Nigeria, researchers explain how they used verbal diaries to capture daily life under pandemic controls, then reached out to Qur'anic schools affected by government clearances. A project-based learning episode covers the Internet Free Education Resource Bank, whose materials are free to download, and plans to add training and monitoring tools. The register throughout is courteous and measured, and the host thanks the guests warmly. What a listener gets is the human detail behind journal findings: the relatives who stepped in, the plan to sell tea, the school that was cleared. Each conversation ends with the article available to download, so every episode leads straight to the full research.