Teaching for Peace and Social Justice in Myanmar

Identity, Agency, and Critical Pedagogy

Mary Shepard Wong, Mary Shepard Wong

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350184091
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Bildung
• Categoria: Bildungstheorie & -praxis

Bringing together scholars and educators based in Myanmar, the USA, the UK, Denmark, and Thailand, this book presents new perspectives and research on the struggle for social justice and peace in Myanmar at this critical juncture. It shows how actors from diverse backgrounds and regions of Myanmar are drawing from their identities, evoking their agency, and using critical pedagogy to advance social justice and peace. The chapters provide the compelling life stories of the authors, specific examples of what they are doing, and insights of how their work might be applied to other contexts. The topics discussed include addressing structural violence, peace curriculum development, identity-based conflict, teaching the history of the country, promoting inclusion, civic education, critical pedagogy, teacher agency, and agendas of research funding for peacebuilding. The foreword and afterword, written by well-known scholars of Myanmar, address the relevance and importance of the book vis-a-vis the current social and political crisis following the February 2021 military coup.

Part I

AGENCY

Chapter 1

PROMOTING INCLUSION WITH PRO-SOCIAL CAPITAL: FROM ENGLISH-LANGUAGE TEACHERS TO AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE IN MYANMAR

Kyawt Thuzar and Zoe Matthews

Introduction

Kyawt

From 2004 until 2017, I worked as the youngest female teacher at two grassroots-level community-based organizations (CBOs) which offered informal low-cost language classes, basic Information and Communications Technology (ICT) training, and bookkeeping programs. These CBOs were led by English-language teachers whose age ranges spanned two generations and whose race and religions were as diverse as their class participants. These organizations resisted the ruling military regime’s¹ tactics of intimidation, harassment, and arrests following the 2007 Saffron Revolution crackdown by continuing to cautiously open classes. Those were the times when classes were under surveillance by military intelligence personnel in plainclothes. Teachers’ names and class schedules were to be reported to the township administration office, and the founders faced constraints like needing permission to open up large-size (50+) classes.

At the time, it was mandatory for schools to sign formal agreements promising that they would not be involved in any kind of political activities or make any mention of human rights in and outside the classroom. My working experiences at these CBOs granted me first hand experience in how dialogic and dialectic pedagogies (Freire, 1970) could be used creatively with large-size classes. It also taught me how grassroots and civilian-led education initiatives were being suppressed and how learners and educators could find loopholes in the regime’s tactics and initiate discussions about social justice.

These community-based social and political movements flourished later as Civil Society Organization (CSO)-led activities after 2011 with the technical support of international organizations such as the Institute for Political and Civic Engagement (iPACE), World Learning. My tenure as an iPACE trainer was from 2014 to 2017. I provided six-week intensive training for members of political parties, and CSOs like ethnic rights-based organizations, training-based organizations for Internally Displaced People (IDP), student and worker unions, and Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning (LGBTQ) rights-based organizations. Through engagement with these participants, I have come to understand that multiple realities exist in multiple contexts. These could be the everyday realities of different ethnic groups, socio economically marginalized groups, and sidelined political parties. All these realities have been dictated by twenty-five years under one-party totalitarian political ideology, twenty years of dictatorship, and the world’s longest civil war between ethnic groups and the Burmese military, the Tatmadaw.

With these personal and professional experiences as a backdrop, as part of the research project for my MEd in Cultural and Educational Policy Studies at Loyola University as a Fulbright scholar (2017–19), I chose to focus on refugees in Chicago. All these positionalities as a researcher and a writer in the field of education have resulted in my exploration of topics like nonacademic support for secondary school girls living as refugees in Chicago, and the interplay between state and non-state education providers and their implications for peace in Myanmar in collaboration with Zoe, my co-author.

Zoe

Cyclone Nargis, the worst natural disaster in Myanmar’s recorded history, hit the Irrawaddy Delta in May 2008, leaving 140,000 dead and millions affected by the devastation.² I was volunteering at a small education project in Bangkok for migrants from Myanmar at that time so I witnessed firsthand the galvanizing of my students toward organizing donations and coordinating relief efforts to help their communities. I started working for Thabyay Education Foundation in the Thai-Myanmar border town of Mae Sot not long after. There I was responsible for providing curriculum and teacher training for the postsecondary schools operating out of the seven refugee camps along the border between Thailand and Myanmar. What I found were the everyday realities of living in the midst of an ongoing struggle over governance and identity (Oh et al., 2019). These were everyday people caught between a “rock and hard place”: the reluctant hosts, the Thai state, and their oppressors across the border. The local “behind the scenes advocacy” (South, 2010) to build systems of resiliency against structural injustices was inspiring.

As I continued to implement teacher training workshops in our affiliated schools, I witnessed the organization and self-determination of non-state education regimes like the Karen and Karenni Education Departments on the border to promote well-being and sustainable futures for their communities. These structures for protection and resilience were part of a “Third Force,” a network of individuals and groups who “sought change through engaging the junta or created opportunities where the state was failing” (Mullen, 2016, p. 9). Education-wise, because of this network, the context along the Thai-Myanmar border was alive with initiatives to address the realities of a failed state for both migrants from Myanmar on the border and the refugee camp residents.

It was within that Third Force community that I had my first interactions with the types of teachers and trainers on whom this chapter is based. These teachers and trainers were the embodiment of Freire’s dialogic practitioners (Freire, 1970). They were the ones who had broken ranks with the army of teacher-centered “banking educators” or teachers who relied purely on rote memorization to implement their curriculum. Instead, these dialogic teachers and trainers expertly wielded their own repertoire of teaching tools to facilitate dialogue in their classrooms using participatory, learner-centered methodology. One result of this expertise is a safe zone, where all students feel a sense of agency, their voices are heard, and their values such as respect, empathy, trust, humility, and integrity being practiced every day. The other outcome is a new generation of individuals equipped with the tools they need to transform their current realities to their preferred futures. Twelve years later, I am still having regular interactions with the Third Force in Myanmar, now faced with the challenge of struggling free of the clutches of pre-transition regime mentalities. With the evidence we present from our research in this chapter, and in future studies, Kyawt and I hope to shed light on the lessons for peacebuilding that can be learned from the change agents still very much in action in the present day.

Our Lens and Context

As mentioned in the Introduction of this book, the 4R (Redistribution, Recognition, Representation, and Reconciliation) framework provides a way for us to capitalize on the interconnectedness between education and peacebuilding (Lopes Cardozo & Maber, 2019). The 4R framework is directly applicable to the Myanmar context (Novelli & Sayed, 2016). A number of other authors have examined the role of education in sustainable peacebuilding, including Lo Bianco (2016), South and Lall (2016), and Salem-Gervais and Raynaud (2020). We will endeavor to look at the matter through the lens of notable classroom pedagogies and inclusive practices in education.

There are two contexts in which the intrinsic meaning of all-inclusive education for unity and peace can be interpreted by education providers in Myanmar (South & Lall, 2016). An education provider can sometimes serve as a proxy for accumulating sociocultural capital: in other words, it is a way to establish their power and legitimacy. This is the danger of education in the eyes of John Dewey (Hopkins, 2018) as the focus is taken away from the needs of the child and placed on the needs of the governing power. If only certain social groups are included or there is only an emphasis on one social group obtaining more sociocultural capital at the expense of another social group, education becomes a divider rather than a connector. The result is that one social group has more power than the other(s).

This is the narrative of identity politics introduced by the regime government, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), in 1988. They created the narrative that there are in total 135 national races/ethnic nationalities. Of the 135 “national races,” there are 120 living ethno-linguistic groups (Salem-Gervais & Raynaud, 2020). This narrative is reflected in the grievances listed by ethnic groups. Realization of unity between ethnic groups in Myanmar thus becomes difficult. Disputes over the number of ethnic groups by other actors perpetuates the basic worldview that education, regardless of who provides it, is only intended to “oppress” or marginalize which introduces two contexts in which to think about “inclusion.”

The first context is to think about what and whose narratives of content to include in the curricula for promoting inclusion and peace in a diverse Myanmar where differing narratives for what “unity” is has implications for sustainable peace (Thuzar & Matthews, 2020). The effort and practices in constructing genuine “unity” through education require Myanmar as a whole to recognize the importance of a shift in an individual’s mindset and culture in classrooms and beyond. Educators need to develop a mindset that breaks free of the fragilities left behind by pre-transition era regimes and overcomes the all-pervasive “us vs. them” narrative. This means to nurture a culture that embraces diverse sets of perspectives and life experiences in education curricula, in pedagogies, and in approaches. This is an integral part of having effective and meaningful “all-inclusive education.”

A second context is to understand the presence of different educational providers who position themselves in three domains. Within the first domain are the education providers in the formal state education sector. Within the second domain are the education authorities in ethnic regions, or in other words, the Ethnic Based Education Providers (EBEPs) or non-state ethnic education systems (South & Lall, 2016). Civil society becomes the third domain for the implementation of educational processes. In each domain exists a multitude of challenges: from geographic to administrative and from political to linguistic.

The First Domain—State Education

Notable challenges in this domain are, first, the language diversity and population dispersion of a total of over nine million school children in formal education representing different ethno-linguistic groups. Many contend that it is not feasible for state schools to deliver all state curricula in line with the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE, or Mother Tongue-Based Education, MTBE or MTB, in short) system to satisfy all language speakers when 46,000 schools are in linguistically heterogeneous communities (Salem-Gervais & Raynaud, 2020). In addition, for nearly two decades, the educators in this domain are the legacy of the “banking education” system from the colonial and following authoritarian regimes (1948–2011). In this domain, training educators to use dialogic and democratic pedagogies is a fundamental solution to breaking down the hierarchy that exists between the learners and educators (Dewey, 2001; Freire, 1970). However, the majority of state educators are not yet fully trained to feel confident in using learner-centered approaches which demand uprooting the teacher-centered pedagogies instilled in communities.

On the one hand, with its recent education reforms, the state was attempting to extinguish the “us vs. them” fire or the fire between all ethnic groups, including the Bamar (Burman) majority, as well as their respective ethnic subgroups. This fire was lit, politicized, and started in colonial classifications of ethnic groups in Myanmar (Clarke et al., 2019). The flames of this fire were fanned by the 1960s’ language-in-education policy appropriation (International Crisis Group, 2003). Under the semi-civilian government in late 2011, the attempts included the formulation of a comprehensive Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) which brought preliminary ceasefires with some Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs). Nevertheless, the major issues such as security sector reform, power distribution in the public administration sector, and lack of ethnic minority voices in the Comprehensive Education Sector Review³ (Jolliffe & Speers-Mears, 2016) for education reform were not resolved, and consequently, the “Ethnic-Bamar” fire is still burning.

After the 2015 election, other attempts include the acknowledgement in the National Education Strategic Plan 2016–21 (NESP) that language barriers for ethnic minority students need to be addressed to reduce the number of school dropouts. Next is the recognition of EBEPs and their MTBE system. In this context, children start primary education with their mother tongue as a medium of instruction followed by a gradual shift toward the national language as they progress through the education system. Finally, with technical support from international actors like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), for example, by way of the “Strengthening Pre-service Teacher Education in Myanmar (STEM)” (UNESCO, 2020) project, the state was looking for ways to reform its teacher education system. These reforms aimed to equip teacher educators with professional skills such as creative and reflective thinking skills, ICT, leadership, and problem-solving skills required for delivering subjects like Morality and Civic Education. Such skills are necessary for an individual to constructively engage with the processes that are affecting their community, and contribute to transformation of the conflicts around them.

The Second Domain—Ethnic-Based Education

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, education is a way of accumulating socio...