Education at all time
Spaces across all Lebanon
Born out of Lebanon’s ongoing crises, ALS ensures education continues even in conflict. Conceived in 2024, rolled out in 2025, and put to use again when conflict resumed in 2026, the initiative sets up learning spaces across Lebanon equipped with offline servers so children can keep learning regardless of internet access. Teachers are also trained to deliver lessons both in-person and online.
ALS was supported by the Ministry of Education and Higher Education (MEHE) of Lebanon and 7 of the spaces were installed in public schools, some of which were turned into shelters.
ALS brings together three key resources: Tabshoura, LAL’s locally adapted digital learning platform; IFERB + Let’s Kids Be Kids, an offline resource bank developed by Education above All, paired with a social-emotional learning program to support children’s wellbeing; Thaki laptops, refurbished devices that put digital learning tools directly in children’s hands and a pedagogy focusing on Self-Directed Learning and Autonomous Learning.
The goal is simple: no matter the circumstances, children keep their right to learn.
Spaces across all of Lebanon
A national network, built in challenging terrain
LAL’s Alternative Learning Spaces are not concentrated in one region or one type of community. They are implemented in different regions, from the Bekaa to the coast, from urban centers in Tripoli to rural villages in Akar, from areas of relative calm to areas that have known the most direct impact of the war. The network is a testament to the belief that geography should never determine a child’s access to quality learning.
The fact that Tabshoura, the digital learning platform at the heart of the ALS initiative, could reach children even in these locations, even when the physical space was compromised, even when families were sheltering rather than schooling, was not accidental. It was the result of deliberate design choices made by a team that understood, from personal experience, what it means to need education to follow you wherever you go.
Digital continuity as a lifline
When schools closed, when roads became impassable, when the noise of war made gathering unsafe, Tabshoura kept learning alive. Children in the South, in displaced communities, in temporary shelters could continue their self-directed learning journeys on whatever device a family had managed to carry with them. This was the promise of the digital solution, not as a substitute for human connection, but as the thread that kept learning continuous when everything else was fractured. The LAL team ensured that thread never broke.
What LAL learned from teachers, not the other way around
There is an assumption embedded in many education reform efforts: that experts design solutions and practitioners implement them. The LAL ALS initiative discovered, quickly and humbling, that this model needed inverting. The teachers were not the recipients of knowledge. They were its primary source.
Working alongside teachers in communities across Lebanon, the LAL team encountered an irreducible truth: no two learning contexts are the same. The pressures facing a teacher in the Bekaa Valley are not those facing a teacher in Tripoli or in the South. Any approach to alternative learning that did not begin by listening, genuinely listening, to teachers in their specific contexts was already wrong before it started.
Lessons learned: aligning with the reality of each place
LAL’s foundational commitment became this: design with teachers, not for them. Every Alternative Learning Space was shaped by the educators who knew the children, the families, the fears, and the rhythms of that particular place. The space was not a template imposed from above. It became a conversation and a trust building approach.
The lessons that emerged from this collaboration were not abstract. They were earned through iteration, honest failure, and the kind of reflection that only happens when practitioners are trusted to speak the truth about what is and is not working.
| 01 Context is everything A learning space that works beautifully in one community can feel alien in another. Flexibility had to be built into the DNA of each space, not added as an afterthought. | 02 Teachers need trust, not scripts The most effective facilitators were those given genuine autonomy. When teachers were trusted to make decisions based on what they observed each day, the quality of learning deepened visibly and durably. |
| 03 Crisis changes children and so must we Children who have lived through trauma, displacement, or conflict do not arrive as blank slates. Education must meet them where they are emotionally first, academically always. | 04 Community buy-in is not optional Spaces that flourished were those where families understood and believed in the approach. Where parents were skeptical, the most important conversations happened with them, not only with children. |
Still believing — education as an act of faith
There is something the most experienced teachers in the ALS network consistently return to when asked why they continue. It is not salary, in Lebanon’s collapsed economy, that answer would be absurd. It is not recognition. It is something harder to name and more durable than either: belief.
Belief that learning, even imperfect, interrupted, improvised learning, is never wasted. And the same belief animates the LAL team members who worked through their own displacement, who coordinated programme delivery from wherever the war had sent them, who refused to treat the disruption of their own lives as a reason to let education stop.
This is also what the self-directed learning model asks of children themselves: not to wait for peace before investing in themselves. Not to treat education as a transaction. But to understand that what they learn, truly learn, belongs to no war, no displacement, no economic collapse. It travels with them, unassailable.
“I tell my students: they can take everything from you: your home, your stability, your sense of safety. But what you learn, truly learn, belongs only to you. That is why we are here, even now.”
Gratitude, and the road ahead
To every teacher who kept a classroom alive through conditions that would have justified stopping: thank you. To every LAL team member who answered a message from the field while navigating their own family’s displacement, who tested a digital feature from a borrowed room, who ensured that a child in the South of Lebanon could still log into Tabshoura and find their learning waiting for them: this work is yours.
The Alternative Learning Spaces initiative is not a finished project. It is a living experiment, shaped by every teacher, every facilitator, every child, and every team member who has brought honesty, courage, and care to it. The lessons it has generated belong to all of us. And the conviction at its center that every child deserves to own their learning, especially in the most difficult times is one that no war, no crisis, and no disruption can take away.
Education does not stop. Not because circumstances allow it. But because people — teachers, teams, families, and children themselves refuse to let it.
| Honoring those who kept education alive. “I never thought of what I do as heroism. I thought of it as responsibility. But when I look back at the years — the explosions, the lockdowns, the socio-economic crisis, the disturbed children — perhaps it was both.” — Teacher, 19 years of service, South |
