Elana Haviv, a 2023 graduate of the PhD in Leadership and Change, has published her dissertation entitled Learning from the Courageous Actions of War and Post-War Time Teachers: A Bricolage of Bosnian Educators.
The purpose of Haviv’s study was to identify the preconditions that inspire courageous action by exploring the choices made by four classroom teachers in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The educators made the decision not only to teach during or after the 1992–1995 war and genocide in their country but to do so in ways that went against official post-war teaching guidelines.
Haviv was drawn to the research because, despite there being a vast number of studies on courage in literature, there was little research that included teachers who remained in their classrooms during wartime or chose to enter their classrooms in transitional societies after their communities experienced war and genocide.
In the final dissertation, Haviv threads three divergent topics: courage, a violent history, and the sharing of personal narratives through the five senses. The teachers she interviewed shared a range of artifacts, which created the foundation of this study. Stories, artifact photos, or other materials are included within the dissertation as well as a digital archive Haviv created. The archive includes anecdotes, artifacts, and historical context as a supplemental element to support the study and serve as a window to the wartime and post-war teacher experiences.
Haviv’s dissertation topic matches her interest in human rights. She is the founder and Executive Director of Generation Human Rights, a nonprofit organization that empowers youth to chart a world free of abuse and genocide through human rights education in the classroom and in the field. She has designed and implemented human rights-based curriculum projects for schools across the United States and in Europe, in refugee camp settings, and in humanitarian emergencies worldwide. Haviv has also written four guides for UNESCO aimed at providing practical advice for teachers on launching and managing constructive classroom discussions on violent extremism, and she serves on the Executive Committee of Human Rights Educators USA.
Read more about Haviv and her dissertation, Learning from the Courageous Actions of War and Post-War Time Teachers: A Bricolage of Bosnian Educators here.
