By Nancy Knickerbocker, BCTF staff
Back in 1989, when David Falconer welcomed the first students into his classroom at Cayoosh Elementary in Lillooet, he could never have imagined that 35 years later he would be giving classes and comfort to hundreds of students in war zones around the world.
Like countless others, Falconer watched in horror as Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. As Ukrainians mobilized to defend their homeland, Smart Osvita, an educational non-profit in Kyiv, sent out an international appeal for help teaching thousands of displaced children.
“I replied right away,” David said. Within a month he had launched Classrooms Without Walls (CWW), reaching out to colleagues across Canada to teach English and other general topics online. Within a year they expanded into Afghanistan, where the Taliban have banned girls from school and university, and later into Myanmar, where civilians face a humanitarian and human rights catastrophe.
Wherever they are, students in Classrooms Without Walls are hungry to learn and eager to connect with classmates and teachers, David says. “It’s all about connections, about getting to know the kids, letting them know you care, that you understand what they’re going through, and that they’re not alone.”
David was teaching in Nunavut when CWW first launched. “The Ukrainian students really enjoyed my stories about polar bears and the northern lights.” During one class he was astonished to see the participant list on Zoom going up from 30 to 50, 100, 200. “Over 300 kids showed up! They wanted to know who is this person on the other side of the world? And why does he care?”
Students responded enthusiastically, despite the horrendous war conditions. One boy wrote, “Me and mom were hiding in the basement when the bombs went up and the roof in front blew off. There’s such a big hole. Sorry I can’t take a picture. Thanks for the lessons!”
David gained a deeper understanding of the students’ realities when he visited Kyiv in March 2024. Just half an hour after their arrival an air raid siren wailed, and they had to seek refuge in a bomb shelter.
“This is the constant stress and anxiety the children are dealing with,” he said. “One student called our hour of class time ‘an island of normal life.’ For 60 minutes they can transport themselves into another, safer place.” Guest teachers such as astronaut Chris Hadfield have helped students dream of other realities beyond their immediate grim circumstances.
English teacher Bonnie McComb was one of the first to respond to David’s appeal. After retiring, she worked as a teacher-librarian in Warsaw. “I felt very connected because I had lived close to Ukraine for five years and had also visited Kyiv and Chernobyl.”
Bonnie offered weekly poetry classes for high school students and found her class sizes ranged from 13 to 100, depending on intensity and proximity of the war. Sometimes students were blocked from class because Russian hackers attacked Ukrainian internet services.
They read ancient and modern poets together, and students sent Bonnie their own poems. One student whose nom de plume was Andrew Bear wrote from occupied Kherson about his dream of going after the Russians with his best friend Smoke. Bonnie was deeply moved by “this 14-year-old boy in a war zone sharing his thoughts with a woman on Vancouver Island.”
Bear and Smoke
Fighting red enemy
For Kherson’s freedom
Figures unknown
Under cold dangerous moon
With iron plan ahead
When Nanaimo biology teacher Sarah Marshall volunteered with CWW, she found that “the Ukrainian school system was still based on the classic old Russian model with kids sitting in rows, expected to stand and deliver.” Our more innovative and inclusive approach through a social/emotional learning lens is more appropriate for children living through trauma, she said.
“In one class of about 80 students, I literally had two kids joining in from bomb shelters. One had to leave the class because the war was coming too close,” Sarah said. “Their everyday reality is a state of fear.” By contrast, for Ukrainian children whose families made it to safety in Canada or elsewhere abroad, “their reality is a state of guilt.”
This understanding helps Sarah support Ukrainian and Syrian refugee students in her school today. “We find with some students it might be three months that they don’t speak at all. But perhaps that makes sense when you come from a place where there’s bombing. They don’t know how to get out of adrenaline mode. We just have to go really slowly.”
David emphasizes that trauma-informed practice is more important than the content of any lessons. Understandably, these students can experience poor concentration, low motivation, memory problems, learning difficulties, depression, anxiety, irritability, and more.
“When they can’t concentrate just put the lessons aside,” he says. “Put on some music. Hold their hands virtually and take them for a walk in the park. Most of all what’s needed is empathy, compassion, kindness, patience, and unconditional love.”
Both volunteers said that working in Classrooms Without Walls is rewarding and exhausting at the same time. “It is a very heartwarming and heartbreaking thing to do,” Bonnie said.
Afghan women risk everything for education
It’s a rainy Saturday morning when about a dozen young Afghan women close the doors to their rooms, go online, and enter a Classroom Without Walls, their only contact with the world outside their homes, a world where women are free to learn, and dream, and converse freely.
Teacher David Falconer, who they some-times call “Grandfather,” opens the class with friendly chatter about the weather in Kabul, Calgary, and Vancouver. He introduces “Mrs. Nancy” and explains that I want to learn from them and write about their struggle for education, despite the obstacles and danger. For security reasons, the young women do not show their faces on screen.
“If the Taliban find out they’re getting these lessons, their lives could be at risk,” David says. “You’ll only see their names and hear their voices. You connect with them heart to heart, not face to face.”
Students Wazhma and Adila give a presentation on life under the most repressive regime in the world for girls and women. They contrast how it was “when women had rights and education,” to their current reality, illustrated by a photo of women hidden underneath blue burkas.
“Women are suffering so much anxiety and depression,” says Wazhma, who was forced out of university after the Taliban seized power in August 2021. “I was doing my BA in Business Administration and then, suddenly, I’m sitting at home doing nothing. It’s hard to accept. Everything is banned for us—education, working outside the home. We don’t even have permission to go to a public park.”
Many young women are forced into marriages against their will. “I had a friend, a very smart and intelligent girl, a role model for me,” Adila says. “She was so good in English, good in math. She wanted to play guitar and piano. She wanted to be a doctor to help other girls and women. But because of her beauty at 15 she was forced to marry a Talib 25 years older than her!”
When women do stand up against their oppressors, they are taken by the Taliban. “We don’t know where they are. And everyone is silent.”
Adila’s voice cracks as she expresses her despair at the muted global response to their plight. “In America people are talking about human rights, women’s rights, but there are no rights here. They say they’re sorry, but they don’t take any action. People all around the world have just forgotten about us.”
And that’s precisely why Classrooms Without Walls is so important to them, Adila says. “It’s the only hope for me. Before I had none. Now Mr. David and other teachers give me hope when I want to give up.”
“I’m so grateful for the chance to talk freely in this class,” says Asma. Other students describe CWW as “the only bright light” and “a real inspiration for us.”
“The Taliban want to control us, our ideas, our thoughts. They fear educated women because we challenge the old ideas,” says Asma. “Because when women are educated they don’t just change their own lives, they bring fairness to the world.”
Their “beloved teacher Mr. David” and the other CWW volunteers are, in turn, inspired by their Afghan students. David praises their courage in taking the immense risk of studying clandestinely, in holding onto their dreams of education, and building a virtual community based on “resilience, kindness, and love.”
Meanwhile, he says, “here in the West we need to call on our governments to put pressure on the Taliban so that someday women in Afghanistan will be free.”
More information
Email David at dfalconer@classroomswithoutwalls.ca. To learn more, visit classroomswithoutwalls.ca.