More Learning Opportunities

The RELIEF team is engaged in a wide range of activities outside of the centre’s core research outputs.

Find out how you get involved in future events below:

Education, Conflict & Fragility

This is a masters-level module for postgraduate academic training to those who are already working in conflict-affected contexts or aspiring to develop their careers in conflict-affected or humanitarian settings. The teaching on the module is informed by ongoing research under the education, conflict and peace building theme within the Centre for Education and International Development

Get Involved

Supporting Teachers in Lebanon: English Language Conversations

We link teachers in Lebanon with volunteers in the UK, mostly UCL academics and students, to enable teachers in Lebanon to improve their English-speaking skills. Each volunteer is paired with a teacher and holds a weekly conversation with them for about 30-60 minutes. Currently we have 16 teacher-volunteer pairs matched.

If you would like to improve your English or become a volunteer please contact Mai Abu Moghli (m.abumoghli@ucl.ac.uk) or Diana Laurillard (d.laurillard@ucl.ac.uk)

Public realm and spaces of refuge: DPU Summer lab, Bar Elias

The RELIEF centre sponsored three students to support their participation in the DPU Summer Lab workshop with CatalyticAction.

Syrian and Palestinian refugees are living in makeshift tents as well as in permanent structures. Recent investments on collective facilities (hospitals, schools, public spaces) have benefited both refugees and host population, and in so doing created opportunities for local infrastructural development on one side and, on the other side, for community cohesion.

The DPU summerLab will look at the current public facilities in the central neighbourhood of Bar Elias, with a specific focus on public spaces, their material realities and the use that multiple groups make of them. We seek to reflect on the complexity of the relationships between different group. In so doing we pursue a wider reflection on the host-refugee relationship – very relevant in the current national and international debate.

We will start our investigation from a series of public spaces in Beirut, where participants will meet the workshop facilitators. The group will then move toward Bar Elias, where we expect three days of on-site investigation, interviews and meetings with local organisations and municipality, participants will design interventions that will foster community cohesion in Bar Elias.

Blended Learning Workshop - Beirut

The workshop was held in the Lebanese American University, organised by Professor Mona Majdalani (Founding Director, Center for Teaching and Learning), and run by Diana Laurillard and Eileen Kennedy.

The aim of the workshop was to give teachers sufficient experience of blended learning that they felt able to develop and test their own Blended Learning designs for learner engagement within their TPD courses on campus.

We began by asking them to share on Mentimeter the tools they already knew, and made a Word Cloud out of the impressive collection they provided. We could then build on that to design ways of embedding them in their classroom teaching.

The workshop also gave participants the link to a programme of MOOCs on Blended Learning, developing by UCL in collaboration with the University of Leeds, and the https://www.futurelearn.com/programs/blended-learning-essentials . Participants especially valued the range of new digital tools they had looked at and could now experiment with in their own teaching.