Educating for sustainable peace in Myanmar

• In Event: The role of teachers in conflict-affected countries

Proposal

This presentation describes the implementation and impact of a two-day Pedagogies of Peace Seminar conducted in Mandalay, Myanmar in January 2018.

1. How is the topic relevant to CIES, sustainability, or a SIG?

The CIES conference theme of sustainability, and the goal of the several SIGs (Education, Conflict, and Emergencies SIG, Peace Education SIG, Religion and Education SIG) align well with this project, which asked, How can education and, more specifically, teacher educators be agents in peacebuilding and reconciliation in Myanmar? The project, supported by a small grant from World Learning and the US Department of State, brought together 29 educators from several regions of Myanmar to engage in 16 hours of workshops designed to inform, inspire, and equip participants to collaborate and create pedagogies of peace, defined as activities that expose and dismantle educational practices that erode peace and envision and create practices that promote it.

2. What is the need or the problem that the program or intervention tries to address?

Reconciliation among ethnic groups has been identified as a major challenge facing Myanmar, which has the notorious distinction of having several of the longest civil wars in history. In November 2015, Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) swept the national elections, ushering in Myanmar's first civilian government since 1962. However, the ethnic peoples’ hopes for peace under the new NLD-led government have not been realized, and the armed conflict has escalated in some regions. Three substantial reports address peacebuilding in education in Myanmar: Novelli et al. (2015) A Theoretical Framework for Analysing the Contribution of Education to Sustainable Peacebuilding; South & Lall (2016). Schooling and Conflict: Ethnic Education and Mother-Tongue-Based Teaching in Myanmar; and Higgins et al. (2016) The Role of Education in Peace Building Country Report: Myanmar. The Higgins et al. (2016) report stated that “At present, there is a stark divide between the national peace process and education reform” (p. 10) and that better consideration of the role of education in the peace process is needed. The seminar sought to address that divide.

3. What advice do you offer or do you seek at CIES, and how can it address similar challenges elsewhere?

The advice I offer and seek from scholars at CIES is: What can be done to bridge this divide between education and the peace process? What is the role of teachers in promoting peace in light of ongoing conflicts in Myanmar? and What can we learn from similar efforts that educate for peace elsewhere? How might the four R Analytical Framework (Redistribution, Recognition, Representation, and Reconciliation) be applied to analyze how education can support conflict transformation and teacher agency in peacebuilding? While a number of organizations work on peacebuilding in Myanmar, few work directly with teacher educators asking them to consider how their pedagogies are contributing to peace or eroding it. We sought to raise awareness of the need to educate for peace and provide teachers with the skills to do so, with the hope that what we learned could be applied elsewhere.

4. What would you have done differently, knowing what you know now about the project or program?

If we would do this again, we would extend the seminar to three days and lengthen the time of feedback to their final group presentations to allow for a more rigorous evaluation using a rubric the participants create. We would ask that participants to provide a short summary in English of their objective and plan, so that the non-Myanmar speakers are able offer a critique. While it was productive for participants to present in their local languages, we needed to allow time for translation so that critical feedback could be offered. Another change we would implement is in our selection of participants. We tried to choose educators from as many different ethnic groups, regions, and schools as possible, but found that selecting groups of teachers from the same school was a more productive strategy. A team approach allows for groups of teachers to continue to meet and support each to become agents of change on their school campuses, sharing their efforts to educate for peace.

5. What was the impact of the project on the problem it targeted? How was the project’s impact assessed?

Two written evaluations were conducted at the end of each day. Both sets of evaluations demonstrated that the majority of participants accomplished the learning outcomes. However only some participants provided evidence that the final outcome of implementing the activities in their own classrooms was completed. A few participants posted photos of their pedagogies of peace activities on the group Facebook page in the weeks following the seminar, but not all participants demonstrated application to their classrooms. All 29 participants received three books on peace building, which were written by and for the people of Myanmar. They also received a flash drive with over 50 documents on peace education, including the lesson plans from the US institute of Peace and several UNESCO reports on peace building in Myanmar. More could have been done to introduce the resources to the participants during the seminar, guiding them in discussions of how they could be used back at their home institutions. It is unknown if and how the resources were used. Following the seminar, some of the participants were part of a large event called the “Peace Festival 2018” held at their university August 2018, which was documented on Facebook. More could have been done to make participants more aware of related peace events like this one and help them network with others who are working on them. We saw the need to document what is being done to educate for peace in Myanmar and have written a proposal for an edited volume describing what teachers, students, and community members are doing, why they are doing it, and the difference they are making.

Author

• Mary Shepard Wong, Azusa Pacific University