Conference Program

The ongoing Israeli military campaign in Gaza has devastated Palestinian educational infrastructure in what scholars and activists have named "scholasticide" — the systematic destruction of an entire people's right and capacity to learn (Dader et al., 2024; Alarabeed, 2025; Desai et al., 2025). In this context, a coalition of students, staff, and faculty activists across various institutions in the US, launched SPOCs for Gaza, a community-oriented online learning initiative designed to create meaningful educational opportunities for students in Gaza and displaced in Egypt (Abodayeh & Miller, 2024). This paper describes the iterative development of two rounds of the program, and reflects on how the intentional building of community across students, volunteers, and educators emerges as a core design principle for meaningful learning — a community in which students in Gaza, alongside volunteers and educators abroad, are active collaborators and decision-makers.

SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) are specifically adapted for their audience and context (Fox, 2013). In SPOCs for Gaza, all materials are translated into Arabic or simplified, optimized for mobile access, and designed to function asynchronously to accommodate chronic internet instability. Arabic-speaking teaching assistants (TAs) provide instructional support while non-Arabic-speaking TAs simplify the material, adapt the activities and projects to align with students’ context, and facilitate discussions, often on Whatsapp. The program grew from approximately 85 students in its first cohort to approximately 400 enrolled by the second round.

A central finding from the first round was that academic access alone is insufficient in contexts of ongoing violence. In response, a student support team was formed, drawing volunteers from across the world, carefully vetted and onboarded through conversations drawing on lessons from the first cohort. Volunteers worked together, sustaining one another as they navigated the emotional and practical complexities of their role. Sometimes they connected their students with one another, weaving a broader peer network across the cohort and across borders. This infrastructure ran alongside a mutual aid network addressing students' basic survival needs. Together, these structures embody a core premise: that education under siege must be built around human connection at every layer and across borders.

The team is currently developing another iteration of the program. The course offering is expanding to include English language courses, which are taught by educators from Gaza themselves. Teaching assistants from Gaza are also integrated into the course team, and the student support infrastructure is being strengthened so that the network of care is sustained across everyone involved.

Designing community-oriented online spaces in the shadow of scholasticide is, this paper argues, an inherently political act — one that insists on the right to learn, to connect, and to create together, even under siege.