Lessons from Palestine: Understanding the resistance of educators and students in times of crisis |
Many educators and students living through war and displacement carry difficult emotions into classrooms, but they can also transform them into acts of care and resistance. To understand this, we need to understand their emotional states at a granular level.
Since January 2024, we have been collaborating on a project with the dean and professors at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Ibn Sina College in Nablus, Palestine, with support from Université de Montréal International.
Our aim is to learn how professors and students talk about their emotions 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 they need to be present and emotionally available for their students while grappling with the impacts of Israel’s military occupation and what many experts have labelled a genocide in Gaza, and they’re looking for tools to help them do that.
Our exchange with Palestinian educators and students led to the development of an intervention tool, CARE (Connection, Action, Resistance, Empowerment), co-designed to address two central emotional states: resistance fatigue and qahr.
Read more: For Palestinian children living in Masafer Yatta, going to school is an act of resistance
Resistance fatigue speaks to a pervasive loss of control over our days, choices and even our inner world. This emotional exhaustion is not only personal, but it is also shaped by political structures of exclusion and dispossession, which includes forced displacement, navigating checkpoints and restricted movement.
However, we witnessed........