Many teachers and students living through war and displacement carry difficult emotions into classrooms, but they can even transform them into acts of care and resistance. To understand this, we'd like to know their emotional states at a granular level.
Since January 2024, we now have been Contribute to a project With the dean and professors of the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Ibn Sina College in Nablus, Palestine, Montreal International University.
We aim to find out how professors and students discuss their feelings in a region marked by occupation, violence, forced displacement and chronic uncertainty.
From January 2024 to September 2025, we met every two months with five professors and the Dean of Nursing and Midwifery at Ibn Sina College.
Palestinian university professors told us that they needed to be present and emotionally available to their students while coping with the consequences of Israel's military occupation and What many experts It has been labeled as genocide in Gaza, and so they're searching for tools to assist them.
Our exchanges with Palestinian teachers and students led to the event of the intervention tool, Care (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), designed interactively to handle two central emotional states: resistance fatigue and.
what's
(AP Photo/Mahmoud Elaine)
Resistance fatigue speaks to a pervasive lack of control over our days, decisions, and even our inner world. This emotional exhaustion is just not only personal, but in addition shaped by political structures of exclusion and dispossession, including forced displacement, navigating checkpoints and restricted movement.
However, we observed one other sentiment in Arabic-speaking countries that we imagine underlies resistance fatigue.
It is an idea that is crucial to understanding what Palestinians and others living through colonial violence in Southwest Asia and North Africa are experiencing.
In Arabic, the word evokes an emotion that mixes powerlessness, grief, and a robust sense of injustice and being overwhelmed by forces greater than oneself. Deeper than grief and deeper, it speaks to the suffocating weight of injustice, the pain of being silenced, shaken, diminished, trivialized and invisible.
It is a posh emotion that also holds the potential for change – to reimagine ways of naming, sharing and caring for one another. It is a selected emotion shaped by oppression, persistent violence and historical trauma that non-Arabic languages ​​often fail to capture.
What we have learned is that it's greater than a sense. It can be an act born of Palestinian determination not to vanish. This is finished through stories, graffiti, songs and on a regular basis resistance that asserts against military occupation and attempts at erasure.
It can feel like anger and grief, however it often looks like actions that function a counter-narrative. These actions are profound types of caring for oneself, one's communities, and one's history and lineage. They are also political tools that claim space, time and dignity.
Hope and care
With our previous work Teachers in Lebanon It has shown that teachers and students alike carry emotional trauma from collective crises similar to economic collapse, war and displacement into the classroom. The Lebanese teachers we spoke to discussed feelings of loss, suffering, injustice, death, violence, unstable living conditions, but in addition hope and resistance.
Similarly, throughout the early days of Genocide in Gazamany teachers expressed A deep sense of oppression And how they managed to show it into moments of hope and joy.
Their commitment to developing educational initiatives for his or her students is powerful evidence of this resistance. As Asma, a teacher from Gaza, explained: “People in the Gaza Strip have become experts at making alternative living plans.”
In this manner, places of suffering also develop into places of hope and care. Our research Exploring emotion workon Appreciating the role of emotions And the dialogue allowed us to show to specific emotions experienced by a lot of our project partners.
(AP Photo/Maya Alerozo)
Care interventions
Inspired by our research findings Fathers Amidst Political Violence in Occupied Palestinewe were considering analyzing our discussions with colleagues at Ibn Sina College when it comes to emotions and resilience.
Through our understanding, we created a culturally adapted intervention care (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment) with professors and students at Ibn Sina College. During a series of online conversations, we reflected on the lived experience of teaching and training under occupation, talking about loss, and being committed to teaching and training.
Care is predicated on this insight, which offers adaptation Acceptance and commitment therapy With situated and culturally grounded strategies for teachers and students to collectively hold space for his or her feelings and their actions.
What began A project This led to the co-creation of a trauma and mental health training module to support the psychosocial needs of healthcare professionals in crisis. Our discussions revealed a typical thread within the goals of our Avicenna colleagues: a desire to share their complex emotions to higher help others, especially their students.
As our contributions evolve, we proceed to explore how emotional concepts can inform pedagogical, political, and relational practices. Offers a lens through which to know not only suffering and hope, but in addition acts of resistance and differentiation under conditions of war and displacement.
Thus our colleagues in Palestine began to share their complex, often antagonistic, emotions arising from these conditions, including the fatigue of resistance.
Together we identified key goals for the meetings, specializing in developing psychological and mental health interventions and training sessions that recognize and validate these emotions. Caring emphasizes practical strategies for teachers and students to carry space for strong emotions individually and collectively.
Care was integrated right into a guidebook and first delivered to a bunch of nursing instructors and educators, who piloted it in student and skilled circles in the autumn of 2025. This move underscores the strength of collaborative change, and the importance of learning about context and diving deeper into culturally specific emotion concepts.
It's a legitimate feeling. Care offers a stepping stone to accompany teachers and professors on this experience, and help them channel it in their very own way, in keeping with their resources and context. In the method, it is vital to indicate that we even have quite a bit to learn from those that feel. Their experiences invite us to query our own understanding and reflection of loss, anger and injustice.