Shaping comparative education inquiry amidst Myanmar’s protracted emergency: Learning from teacher education designed for disruption

• In Event: Teacher Education and Comparative and International Education: Exploring the Symbiotic Relationship between Two Scholarly Fields

Proposal

Recognizing the increase of children learning in conflict zones (Fylkesnes et al, 2019), it is crucial to consider how practitioners in the field of Comparative and International Education (CIE) can more deeply engage with teacher education in emergencies and understand the systems and actors therein. This paper draws upon previous research on how teacher education systems in Myanmar and its borderlands may be designed for disruption within contexts of protracted emergency (Rinehart and Tyrosvoutis, 2022) and explores how the strengths embedded in such a design may be less visible to researchers within CIE who use lenses that reference neoliberal reforms and development paradigms such as high-stakes accountability, standardization, and corporate management practices. The authors suggest conceptual models and methodologies which may be useful for CIE inquiry towards understanding teacher education in contexts of protracted conflict, displacement, and emergency, including lenses of resilience and (anti)fragility, and the use of participatory action research and comparative case studies
The extent to which contemporary teacher education concerns in the field of CIE speak to the situation in Myanmar depends on the teacher education system. Government teacher education may be understood through much-discussed and debated topics and concepts relating to policy-borrowing, qualifications and professionalization, and accountability for teacher education itself (cf. Groundwater-Smith and Mockler, 2009; Hardy, 2012; Cochran-Smith, 2021a); however, such theories and concepts are likely unsuitable for, and may even be detrimental to, understanding parallel teacher education systems in the Myanmar context. Applying these theories may render us blind to essential elements of resilience, obscuring the aspects of parallel teacher education systems that have enabled them to withstand decades of disruption. While these parallel systems have undoubtedly been influenced by isomorphic teacher education trends, such as the development of teacher competency standards frameworks (Lall, 2020), their primary influences are the needs of the disadvantaged communities they serve, which have been the target of state-enacted conflict and marginalization for the better part of the past six decades (Rinehart and Tyrosvoutis, 2022). Therefore, we suggest it may be appropriate to use lenses associated more with EiE contexts, most notably the concepts of resilience and (anti)fragility, to frame and learn from teacher education actors in parallel systems. We set out to establish lines of inquiry that can support research of teacher education in protracted EiE contexts in general, and parallel teacher education in Myanmar and its borderlands specifically. Within this paper we aim to put forward theoretical and conceptual frameworks combined with methodological approaches for the investigation of teacher education in protracted emergency from an international comparative perspective. After establishing the authors’ positionality, the second section looks at how we have understood mainstream state-led teacher education and parallel teacher education systems in Myanmar and its borderlands. The third section covers how EiE lenses may be more appropriate to use when looking at parallel teacher education systems. The fourth section offers recommendations from the authors about possible research designs and thematic areas towards understanding how parallel teacher education systems operate.

Authors

• Greg Tyrosvoutis, TeacherFOCUS

• William Gray Rinehart, Mote Oo Education