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UNESCO Happy Schools project brings joyful learning to classrooms in Yemen
The ongoing conflict since 2014 has waged war on Yemen’s education system, with nearly 3,000 schools destroyed or repurposed for sheltering internally displaced persons, according to recent figures from the Education Cluster. According to UNOCHA, over 2.7 million children – nearly a third of the total student population – are out of school, and millions more are at risk of losing their learning opportunities because teachers have been irregularly paid for years, and in some cases, have been victims of violent attacks. As more and more classrooms are pulled into zones of conflict, generations of children have been deprived of opportunities for cognitive and social-emotional development and of the community support that successful school systems create.
The Happy Schools project in Yemen seeks to support holistic schooling through cost-effective, human-centred interventions. The first phrase of the project was the adaptation of the global Happy Schools framework to Yemen’s national context. With support from Al-Awn Foundation and the UNESCO regional office for the Gulf States and Yemen, the Ministry of Education formed a national team to lead the adaptation of UNESCO’s global Happy Schools criteria into a Yemen-specific framework for positive and inclusive school environments that support learning and well-being.
“The Happy Schools project aims to educate the students in the school emotionally, mentally, psychologically, and intellectually,” says Dr. Hafidha Saleh Nasser, Secretary-General of the Yemen National Commission for Education, Science and Culture. As a member of the Yemeni National Happy Schools Team, Dr. Nasser expects that “the outputs of this type of education will serve the Sustainable Development Goals in general if it produces a generation equipped with science as it should be.” The revised global Happy Schools framework, to be published by UNESCO in early 2024, is informed by decades of research from the field of the Learning Sciences. Evidence from around the world indicates that interactive, iterative, joyful learning can improve educational outcomes and foster educational resilience through strong school-based relationships.
“Feeling and practicing happiness”
During the pilot phase of the Yemen project, school leaders from the Yemen National Team translated the framework into activities and teaching approaches in three schools in the Hadhramaut governorate. “The idea of happy schools is a catchy and intelligent one. Who among us doesn't want our children to be happy?” says Mr. Anwar Ali Bashghiwan, Principal of Seiyun Secondary School. “Feeling and practicing happiness, preparing people and the environment, and defining the roles of stakeholders leads to enhancing academic achievement, boosting morale, promoting desirable behaviours, forming a positive attitude towards learning, and putting relationships between students in the right framework. This is where the intelligence lies.”
Mr. Bashghiwan began his school’s project with teachers, whom he sees as core players in the process of transformation to Happy Schools. Teachers were trained on the fundamentals of positive psychology, or the idea that happiness “comes from within and is a decision an individual takes, making him look at everything in his environment in a positive way – even if it is little or rare – to improve his psychology,” says Mr. Anwar. He explained that the teachers received this idea with “conviction” and practiced it in a “deliberate and positive manner” in their classrooms through rearranging the classroom layout, adding student-made decorations, and increasing students’ opportunities to share their work with each other.
Teachers at the Seiyun Secondary School claimed that these small changes, which cost nothing, had a positive impact on students’ relationships with each other. Moreover, they noticed fewer unwanted behaviors, an increase in participation and creativity, and even to some extent, a reduction in cases of anxiety and fear of exams due to the reassurance they received from their teachers.
“The Happy Schools project is the dream of every educator to raise the motivation for learning among students through human interaction and activating learning methods that touch the learners' interests, so their energies are released, and their creativity is revealed,” says Mr. Muhammad Omar Hassan, Principal of Salem Bin Mahfouz Schools. “Happy schools also make the school environment loved by learners through close relationships between teachers and learners.”
These preliminary findings provide a promising case for scaling this initiative to encompass more schools and geographical areas. However, implementing projects at national scale in Yemen during times of crisis presents considerable challenges. Scarce resources, competing priorities and logistical hurdles can hinder progress and diminish the perceived importance of the initiative.
Peer-learning session
To help build the case for wider adoption of the initiative, UNESCO organized a peer-learning session between the Yemen team and the coordinators of the Happy Schools programme in Portugal, where a Ministry-accredited professional development course inspired by the UNESCO framework has been rolled out to teachers and school leaders since 2020, and it is now on its seventh iteration due to popular demand.
Dr. Jorge Humberto Dias, a university professor and co-creator of the Portugal Happy Schools course, believes in the transformative potential of the project in Yemen, as school happiness becomes even more meaningful in conflict situations. In fact, it was during the COVID-19 crisis when he launched the course in Portugal with his co-creator Dr. Lília Vicente, a team coordinator at the Ministry of Education’s Directorate-General for School Administration. Together, they decided it was of the utmost importance throughout the pandemic disruptions to enhance well-being and happiness of teachers, school leaders and students to support learning continuity.
Dr. Lília Vicente reflected that while Portugal has not experienced the same level of crisis as Yemen, it has passed through economic crises, unemployment, and migration that have heavily impacted schools, and that “it is in these challenging times where prioritizing daily joy is most needed, for it is when people are at their most vulnerable, disconnected and depressed.”
In Yemen, and indeed around the world, there is much work left to do to raise awareness of the importance of happy school environments in shaping lifelong learners and strong communities. At the global level, UNESCO is working with many teams at headquarters, and its institutes – including specialists in inclusion and gender equity, social-emotional learning, teacher and school leader well-being, mental and physical health, global citizenship and sustainable development – to ensure that the global framework gives countries a practical tool to consider all factors that contribute to positive learning spaces.
To continue this work, and to scale up the implementation the Happy Schools project throughout Yemen and other interested countries, UNESCO is seeking partners who share the belief in the transformative potential of positioning happiness in and for learning as a means and a goal of quality education. The global Happy Schools Framework is versatile and flexible, and UNESCO encourages Member States, organizations or schools interested in transforming their education systems, to take the framework and make it their own, adapting it to their needs and context.
