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The Gender in Education Network in Asia-Pacific (GENIA) Toolkit was originally designed in 2003 when the Gender in Education Network in Asia Pacific was established. This fifth edition of the GENIA Toolkit, which EENET team members helped to develop, includes 25 tools. It is designed for use by gender focal points and education planners and implementers. It introduces key concepts and theoretical debates, and outlines practical approaches for mainstreaming gender equality throughout the education system, and within education policy.

The toolkit is designed to be used selectively, depending on the user’s needs. It can be used as a self-study tool. Readers can select topics that they have identified as priority learning areas to help them improve their own understanding and practical capacity. The toolkit can also be used by trainers to facilitate training sessions. Trainers can choose tools from the kit that best match the needs of their trainees.

The 25 tools can be downloaded individually. Or you can download the full kit as one document.

We have been filming in Ukraine for the last week or so. Our team had a few extra challenges this time – some luggage didn’t arrive and they had to do some urgent shopping for clothes and a camera tripod! Everything was soon back on track. Photos from the schools where we are filming will be coming soon.

Volume 6 of the Journal on Education in Emergencies (JEiE) – published by Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies – will be a special edition on early childhood development in emergencies. The deadline for submitting full manuscripts for this edition of JEiE has been extended until 15 October 2015. Please check the journal’s webpages for full details of the call for papers, ideas for article topics and guidance on how to submit.

This conference is taking place this week in Bangkok (24-26 September). If you are attending, we draw your attention to a presentation on Wednesday 25th on ‘The Impact of Language Barriers in Education for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh’ which discusses research by Translators without Borders that one of our consultants, Rachel Bowden, was involved in. There are many other exciting topics and initiatives being discussed too.

If you are not attending the event, you can still follow the conference social media pages to see what’s being discussed, add your thoughts to the online discussions, and find out about the post-conference publication. There is also a short pre-conference booklet which introduces key themes and provides some suggested reading on the topic of inclusion, mobility and multi-lingual education.

The conference highlights that human mobility is reaching unprecedented levels due to an increasingly mobile workforce, increased mobility for higher education, and the highest ever levels of involuntary displacement/refugees. In the Asia-Pacific region, challenges of inclusion, social cohesion and peacebuilding are raised, for both mobile populations and stable but linguistically marginalised populations, including issues of access to civic participation, justice, health and information. While more children are in school, many are still not learning, raising fundamental questions about the balance of local, national and global languages in education.

For the last few years, EENET has worked with Norwegian Association of Disabled (NAD) to develop and test an innovative inclusive education teacher training approach in Zambia and Zanzibar. You can now read about the project’s background and take a detailed look at the process in a dedicated new section on EENET’s website: Participatory development of teacher training. By early 2020 we hope to share the training modules under creative commons licence.

The approach has focused on working collaboratively with trainers and other key education personnel in each country to develop in-service training modules that are relevant to the context, built around action research principles, and which local trainers own and have the skills to constantly improve. By involving pre-service trainers in the process from the start, change in pre-service teacher education is also being influenced and supported.

We have also prepared a briefing paper which answers key questions about the teacher training approach.