2026 Study Links Local School Lessons to Disaster Resilience

How did local knowledge reshape lessons?

Every disaster has distinct effects on communities, so local culture, beliefs and other contextual factors matter when educators address the human dimensions of risk and recovery. The cases in the study put those factors at the center of teaching rather than treating safety information as the same everywhere.

• After the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, community mapping connected students with the earthquake’s real human impacts. The activity reconnected them with their community, encouraged hope and collective action, and identified opportunities for rebuilding.
• After the earthquake and tsunami on Nias Island, Indonesia, educators embedded safety messages in traditional Maena dance lyrics. The method overcame local taboos against discussing disasters, incorporated local cultural practices and enabled intergenerational learning between children and parents.

Together, the examples illustrate meaning-making: learners connect information to people, practices and rebuilding around them. The approach extends classroom work into relationships and shared local action, rather than stopping at memorized rules or isolated drills.

Why must schools collaborate with communities?

Alan Reid, also a professor in Monash’s Faculty of Education, said every successful initiative relied on collaboration among schools, local community groups, disaster-response experts and teams drawn from different professional fields. Schools adapted their programs dynamically to real community needs, rather than delivering a fixed curriculum.

Reid argued that relationship-based learning can cultivate an ethic of care—shared responsibility for looking after one another. He said: “Relational and socialized forms of education generate an ethic of care in learners in ways that standardized textbook drills simply cannot. We need educational frameworks that empower students to co-create goals with their communities.”

That means students help set community goals with adults and experts, not simply receive goals from them. It also gives local groups and schools a way to revise plans as conditions change.

What can be learned across cultures?

Ilan Kelman, a co-author and professor at University College London and UiT The Arctic University of Norway, said disaster risk is not uniform. Communities interpret risk, memory and recovery differently, whether they face tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan or flooding in the United States.

Kelman said effective resilience education places learners, teachers and local residents on an equivalent footing instead of treating schools as the sole source of expertise. Mutual learning across cultures, he argued, shows that resilience grows from local trust and local knowledge.

What are the authors asking schools to change?

The authors call for more transformative and meaningful education that fosters democratic structures and involves young people and schools in formulating goals, not merely realizing them. Their central recommendation is to build programs around empathy, local meaning, shared decisions and active participation, then allow communities to shape the work.

What does the evidence not show?

The research summary does not report a sample size, numerical effect estimate, follow-up period or controlled comparison. Readers therefore cannot use this release to judge how much resilience any program produced, how long benefits lasted or whether results transfer to every disaster setting.

The findings are best read as evidence for a promising approach and a set of design principles, not a universal guarantee. The cases document hope, collective agency and collaboration, but the release does not quantify a causal effect.

The paper bears the title “Why ethics, relationality and meaning-making matter to resilience education: Initiatives from global disaster contexts.” Review of Education published it in 2026 under DOI 10.1002/rev3.70208.