Teacher Hanan Al Hroub is trying to rid Palestine of violence, one classroom at a time. On Sunday, she won $1 million for her efforts.
Al Hroub is the second person to win the Global Teacher Prize, an annual award from the nonprofit Varkey Foundation, which describes it as the "Nobel Prize for Teaching." More than 8,000 teachers in 140 countries applied for this year's prize.
Al Hroub is dedicated to steering her primary school students away from lives of violence. She has a deep personal understanding of how violence can have a traumatizing effect, according to a press release from the Varkey Foundation. Growing up in a refugee camp, Al Hroub witnessed fighting at a young age. Then, many years later, her children witnessed a shooting that deeply disturbed them. In her book We Play and Learn, Al Hroub describes her method of promoting peace through developing trusting relationships with students and encouraging literacy, according to the press release.
"I tell the teachers, whether they are Palestinian or around the world: Our job is humane, its goals are noble," Al Hroub says in a video about her work. "We must teach our children that our only weapon is knowledge and education."
Pope Francis presented Al Hroub with her prize by videocast. Last year, Nancie Atwell, an English teacher from Maine, took home the prize. Al Hroub was one of 10 finalists in contention for the award, hailing from countries including Kenya, the United States and the U.K.
“We, as teachers, can build the values and morals of young minds to ensure a fair world, a more beautiful world and a more free world," said Al Hroub after receiving the prize. "The future seems far and ambiguous. However, when you are involved in making it, the world represents a light."
The Varkey Foundation and its founder, Sunny Varkey, created the Global Teacher Prize to elevate the work of exceptional educators. The foundation aims to promote education and convey "to a celebrity-obsessed world that teachers are important and worthy of respect," Varkey said last year.
Public figures and celebrities including Kevin Spacey and Bill Gates sat on a committee that helped decide the winner.
A majority of Americans believe public school teachers are underpaid and underappreciated, according to a nationally representative HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted in April 2015. In that poll, more than half of Americans said they feel "excellent" or "good" about the public school teachers in their communities.
