In the asphalt courtyard outside Zarqa Preparatory Boys School #2, Samer Abu Koush watches 22 young boys chase after a bright red soccer ball. As their teacher and coach, Abu Koush knows that many of the boys have grown up in a refugee camp. They live in the northeast corner of Jordan, under the sponsorship of the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and most will return home from soccer practice shivering because they can’t afford warm winter coats.
Abu Koush teaches at one of 172 Jordanian schools run by UNRWA, which began work in the country following the 1948 Arab-Israeli conflict and currently educates almost 124,000 refugee students in Jordan. A Palestine refugee himself, Abu Koush is driven by a strong feeling of responsibility towards his community.
Abu Koush's motivation to create a safe school space surged after completing a five-month professional development program at Montana State University in Bozeman through the International Leaders in Education Program (ILEP) [8]. In addition to his coursework, the program included an internship at Bozeman High School, which exposed him to new ideas about the role of schools. “I noticed that the school is not only a place to get new knowledge or to learn new things,” he reflected, “but that it also offers student’s a ‘second life’ and involves a lot of activities such as sports, entertainment, and traveling.”
Excited by the array of extracurricular offerings and support structures he saw in Montana, Abu Koush sprung into action upon his return to Jordan. He formed a new school soccer team after being trained as a coach by the international organization Right to Play, which uses sports to improve children’s lives in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the world. Recently, the team competed in a local championship, where they received the award for “best fair and collective play.” Abu Koush says that his student-athletes are now more committed to attend class, are more respectful to each other, and believe more in teamwork. He has already seen the absence rate decline among his students and their career goals become more ambitious.
Abu Koush ‘s vision is to make his school “a place my kids like to be, where they can learn, play, and win.” The school often faces budgetary crises, so to surmount these difficulties, Abu Koush and his colleague Majed Al Jundi mobilized local companies and businessmen to contribute funds that bought 200 notepads, 50 calculators, and 950 kilograms of groceries for his students. He also involved his students directly in the efforts to revitalize their school, organizing a clean-up day to wash the classrooms, walls, and desks, and paint brightly colored murals and maps on the classroom walls.
Abu Koush is part of an active network of ILEP alumni from around the world, and he also keeps in touch with the American teachers and professors he met in Montana. “We share our ideas, projects, and experiences in our home countries,” he said. “They really sent me so many great ideas.” He also intends to apply for an ILEP Alumni Small Grant to host a workshop for science teachers in his community.
“The most important thing to me is to see the students become successful,” Abu Koush says, “doing something that can help them and their families.”
The International Leaders in Education Program is a semester-long, graduate-level academic program at US universities, which includes coursework and intensive training in teaching methodologies, curriculum development, and the use of technology for education for outstanding secondary teachers from the Near East, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. ILEP is a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and is administered by IREX.
