“While conducting all the interviews at Kharkiv, daily missile attacks and power outages subjectively impact my ability to analyze their data.”
“I received the required source materials just before the attack on the city.”
“…after the Russians started the new airstrikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, there were new blackouts, and I would not have electricity to work.”
Quotes from midterm reports of IUFU students, Spring 2024
After IUFU opened opportunities to receive grants for research projects, students who received stipends were asked to submit midterm reports—one-page forms that enable student coordinators, mentors, and course directors to track the students’ progress on their research. These “Midterms” fulfilled their function and, together with formal or informal conversations during mentoring sessions, Q&As after lectures, and corridor chats during Winter and Summer Schools, gave an insight into the students’ experiences of the war. We are still learning how much war has affected students’ lives, and the complexity and particularity of each student’s situation creates a challenge for mentors, course directors, lecturers, and coordinators. In the course of my work at IUFU as a mentor and coordinator, I saw how organizers and participants of the program had to address issues related to students’ location in war, differences in knowledge and background, physical and mental conditions that influence their learning and research ability, inequality in language proficiency, and various traumatic experiences that can be both motivational and also highly triggering. In this essay, I reflect on these challenges and summarize the organizational and pedagogical solutions that the IUFU team has been developing through the semesters to fill educational gaps for Ukrainian students affected by the war and help them to deal, at least to some extent, with the traumas the war brings.
The current location of each of our students is the most obvious and least controllable challenge. Students join IUFU not only from different regions of Ukraine but also from various countries around the world, and the first semesters of the program even had participants from the occupied territories. This means there is always a significant discrepancy in students’ access to a stable internet connection and IUFU classes and resources. Despite significant progress in shooting down the missiles by Ukrainian Forces in 2024, there is still no completely safe place in Ukraine. Thus, the danger may force students to interrupt the learning process at any time, and mentors and lecturers should be ready for that. We communicate to our students that their safety is a priority of IUFU; they are asked to leave the classes and go to the shelter any time the air siren is heard, and it was not a rare occurrence when students indeed notified us of the danger in their area in the Zoom chat box and left the meeting earlier. However, not all students go to shelters or stop the meeting. When some of the group remains in the Zoom class and others leave for shelters, especially during the intensified attacks on cities like Kyiv, Dnipro, or Kharkiv, it creates an additional divergence in students’ engagement. Even though the lectures are recorded, students who join asynchronously lose the chance to ask questions and become actively engaged in the process, and may not have time to re-watch the session before the next one. When missing too much of a lecture or discussion, the student may lose interest or lack the confidence to participate actively. Russians’ deliberate targeting of civilian infrastructure creates an additional challenge, as missile strikes cause severe Internet and electricity cuts. Finally, students can suffer from forced relocation and destruction of university buildings, which often leads to less effective online or hybrid modes of studies that developed after COVID-19 and have been prolonged by war. When at school, many of our students attended classes online due to the global pandemic and now have to continue online participation in university classes, significantly affecting their participation in education.
Dealing with such issues at IUFU requires a great deal of effort to develop synchronous and asynchronous learning models, where students in disadvantaged positions do not feel left behind and have multiple options to catch up with their peers.
Recorded meetings and a system of takeaways to track the asynchronous participation proved to be useful. Yet, still, there is a need for individual models of learning with higher flexibility in the more dangerous periods that would accommodate the current safety situation of each student.
In addition to the Russian occupation of the new territories, the destruction of universities, and the expropriation of cultural heritage and historical materials created many losses for Ukrainian education and posed new obstacles for students and young researchers, which cannot be solved in the near future. Even in the territories controlled by Ukraine, constant missile attacks, martial law, and the danger of occupation forced archives, libraries, and museums to close, relocate, or restrict access to their collections. In their midterm reports, students often mention the lack of access to sources, and we usually recommend they slightly modify their topic because there is no way of solving this problem. The CEU Library and other open-access platforms help students to fill the gap for methodological literature and primary and secondary sources, but more solutions need to be developed, not only on our level but also with much need of help from international cultural and educational networks.
The language proficiency of students is another challenging aspect for IUFU. It depends on various factors, including the quality of previous language courses in school and university, which have been badly damaged by both COVID-19 and the war, although the proper research is still to be done. Most IUFU applicants indicate a B2-C1 level on their forms, and some mention a B1 or even A2 level. In their feedback, students often mention difficulties with English, especially at the beginning of the semester for the new students of IUFU. Academic English classes have been developed to solve the issue, although, according to mentors, not all students can participate, mostly because they are overloaded with their studies or other IUFU courses. All the same, mentors’ feedback and general observation show significant development amongst students in the level of Academic English, especially in speaking.
Often, the key to success is the friendly and open-to-mistakes atmosphere at the mentoring sessions, where students communicate their thoughts more freely than with the guest lecturers.
While it is often possible to address educational differences, the physical and mental state of the students is much more fragile and complicated. Ukrainian students are mostly eager to study, but at certain points of the semester, they may also be subjected to depression, attention or anxiety disorders, lack of motivation to finish, constant tiredness, sleep deprivation, and health problems. Repeating missile strikes and electricity cuts, especially in winter, have harmful effects on students’ physical and mental states. Even Ukrainians abroad, while not being under a direct threat, still have many issues with adaptation to the new country and language, and suffer from homesickness, experience disadvantages of refugee status, anxiety, and fear for those at home, and so on. Above all, both Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad encounter tragic events, societal or personal, which impact significantly on their studies or research progress and sometimes force them to disappear from the program without notice. Thus, we started to offer free short-term psychological help to give students some support but this is not a substitute for real treatment. At the end of the fifth semester, the need for this short-term aid remains much higher than we can provide, and we have to work further on possible solutions.
Besides personal traumatic experiences, some IUFU courses address the war in its complexity and brutality, trying to make sense of it and create a possible set of academic and practical responses. We aim to create a welcoming but also safe and flexible atmosphere for the discussions, so any triggering topic may be redirected or stopped; but also, gives space for students to express the triggering character of the conversation openly without fear of being seen as over-emotional or traumatized. At this point, there is no student without trauma, but their trauma responses are very different. Some of them are willing to scientifically explore and explain the new reality or learn how to communicate about their hurtful experiences with a broader audience, especially with foreigners. During the first semesters, there was a visible desire at the mentoring sessions to share and speak about the war and fresh memories between peers, to explain war horrors, and find understanding and support. Still, for some students certain topics or questions were extremely triggering: mentors and coordinators have already encountered instances when tears or emotions prevented students from speaking despite encouragement. In addition, the students themselves raise concerns about the bias in their research due to war and traumatic experiences; they may be inspired to write about war-related topics but struggle to stay within the scholarly framework and lack the expertise to finish their work. Mentors and coordinators need to balance strict professionalism and a caring attitude. On the one hand, we should not paternalize students or treat them as overemotional or traumatized because the war has not prevented students from being skilled and hardworking researchers, and their experience remains highly valuable for new perspectives on the world. On the other hand, we should not burden or re-traumatize students with unnecessary comments or triggering materials, and should resolve any conflicts very carefully, noting that trauma and ongoing danger to the students and members of their families make the evolving confrontations, natural to any educational process, more heated and difficult to solve. The pedagogical dimension and possible responses to these challenges are still to be studied, especially because trauma-oriented approaches are often focused on a few traumatized learners in the room or the institution but not when all students, without exception, share various experiences of tragic events.
The picture will be incomplete without a few words on mentors, coordinators, course directors, and lecturers, who may experience the same problems. Many are Ukrainians, with some still residing in Ukraine. They hear the same air raid sirens, live through electricity and Internet cuts, suffer from lack of access to resources, struggle with physical and mental conditions, and encounter tragic events on a personal or communal level.
Most of the IUFU team, even if not Ukrainians, have close connections to Ukraine, meaning family, friends, work relations, or professional interests, which motivated them to participate in the program, creating a certain level of vulnerability.
Finally, the novelty, flexibility, and entanglements of the program require much effort and time, and pose another challenge because, for all participants and organizers, IUFU is a side project that has to be dovetailed into full-time jobs and affiliations.
We encounter more and more examples of how war has damaged the educational process in Ukraine, with each forcing programs like IUFU to find new ways to mitigate the destruction. Alongside the concrete answers to the challenges listed above, during the five semesters, with much effort, many attempts, and discussions, IUFU developed more general principles of pedagogical work in war realities. Below are just some of them, and the full list is much bigger:
- Individual approach and guidance for students during the educational process. This includes constant checks of students’ mental and physical states, as well as learning and research capacities, by gathering feedback in one-to-one or small group communication, open and informal discussions, and other methods that help to spot students’ struggles in time, carefully approach them, and develop solutions.
- Flexibility. The electricity cuts were the most demanding trial for IUFU’s flexibility, but the program passed through it with students showing good results and finishing their research projects on time. Flexibility requires preparedness for multiple scenarios at the courses or mentoring sessions, intense communication with mentors and lecturers, and a long and complicated planning process for each semester.
- Creation of additional possibilities and trying them “in the field.” With the war damaging so many aspects of the educational process (cognitive, methodological, lingual, source-related, etc.), the more that is offered to fill those gaps, the better. Psychological aid and Academic English courses are examples of such options, revised after each semester to adapt to the students’ needs.
- Communication and sharing the experience. With the novelty of organizing the educational process in the war conditions and with so many newly created approaches in the program, the experience of mentors, coordinators, and course directors is unique and worth sharing. Moreover, the diversity of students and challenging situations at some mentoring sessions or lectures, when discussed, may help to find solutions for future semesters or further work with Ukrainian learners in war. We still lack proper statistics, pedagogical analysis of the current situation, or scientifically developed responses, so before it all appears, mentors and coordinators will remain self-educated specialists taught by trials, mistakes, and successes.
- Teamwork and collaboration. The aforementioned difficulties with the educational process require much attention, effort, and time, while mentors and coordinators are themselves exposed to the damaging influence of war, exhaustion, and time restriction. The solution is to work in pairs or small teams and share the responsibilities in a way that the brief absence of a person for personal or other reasons does not damage the carefully created system. The proper attention and constant feedback from the extended body of mentors also create a welcoming atmosphere for students who can always have a person to rely on while participating in IUFU.
There is so much done; there is so much to do. War teaches educational specialists to be prepared for multiple scenarios and still await something beyond imagination, offer stability in turbulent times, and be flexible enough to react to anything. It is often the admiration of students that keeps the IUFU organizing team inspired and motivated to develop the program further. It is truly worth acknowledging and praising the way Ukrainian students are passing through a very dark time yet still want to learn, grow, and keep working for the future.
The text was prepared for publication in collaboration with Nadiia Chervinska (CEU), Kateryna Osypchuk (CEU), Yevhen Yashchuk (University of Oxford), and John Farndon.