Profile
Dr Bassel Akar is Associate Professor of Education at Notre Dame University – Louaize, Lebanon (NDU) and Research Fellow at Centro de Estudos Africanos, Universidade do Porto. From 2014 to 2021, he served as Director of the Center for Applied Research in Education at NDU. His research and development work in education over the past 12 years has focused on lower middle-income conflict-affected countries, namely Lebanon and those in the wider Arab region including Jordan, Yemen, Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan and Egypt.
The studies have contributed to four core knowledge fields in these fragile contexts undergoing various forms of armed conflict, systemic corruption and violations of children’s rights to education: (1) education for social and human development through citizenship, history and early childhood education; (2) education for young people made vulnerable by war and crises; (3) empowering teachers as agents of sustainable change and (4) ethical and inclusive methods of inquiry for highly vulnerable populations.
Dr Akar published a book on citizenship education, Citizenship education in conflict-affected areas: Lebanon and beyond (2019) and an article on empowering teachers as agents of change in “Citizenship education in conflict-affected areas and nation-states: empowering teachers for sustainable reform” (2020) in a special issue edited by Professor James Banks for Intercultural Education.
In addition to co-editing three special issues (2020, 2021, 2022) on teacher agency for Public History Weekly, he finalizing a manuscript on school-based practitioners’ agency during school closures.