War Schools: teaching innovations implemented across makeshift educational spaces during the military siege of Sarajevo Luka Lucić Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY, USA ABSTRACT Educational practices that developed under the conditions of the military siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War (1992 – 1995) are examined. Analyses of interviews with teachers and students are juxtaposed with archival documentation to reveal the mode of educational activities and the structure of the curriculum imple- mented. By exploring how different conceptualisations of space and time rendered by the condition of the siege prefigure different human activities, the development of educational infrastructures across the besieged city are traced chronologically. The analyses highlight two educational forms: War Schools a network of make- shift mixed-age underground classrooms and Radio School daily educational broadcasts—together with the curricular innovations they engendered. Departing from a focus on individual outcomes such as deficits, trauma, and aggressive behaviours, this work instead argues that collective educational activities have the ability to constructively mediate threatening external circumstances and support young people’s psychological capacities even during the times of crisis. KEYWORDS War School; Radio School; curriculum development; psychological development; Bosnian War Introduction On a cold Thursday morning in February of 1993, when residents of Sarajevo turned on their radios, they heard a young female voice: Good morning school children. Have you heard, dear school children, of Shah Jahan? No? He once ruled a country in the East. His dearest wife was called Mumtaz Mahal, which means ‘jewel of the palace’. Often, as a nickname, she was called Taj. This was the voice of Samira Berisalić, a 19-year-old Radio Sarajevo volunteer who, every Thursday at nine o’clock in the morning almost a year into a full-blown military siege of the city, hosted a lecture in a series entitled Sketches of Architecture. Over the next ten minutes, while the sounds of sporadic gunfire echoed over Sarajevo, listeners could hear that in distant India, on the shores of river Yamuna, the building of the Taj Mahal commenced in 1632. Through radios powered by bicycle dynamos or old car batteries, they could also learn that craftsmen from Arabia, Turkey, Persia, and even as far away as CONTACT Luka Lucić llucic@pratt.edu Pratt Institute, 200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11205, USA PEDAGOGY, CULTURE & SOCIETY https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2020.1768582 © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC