Education in the Civil Disobedience Movement (CDM): Atopian Curricula and Anti-authoritarian Resistance in Myanmar and the Thai border

• In Event: Curricula, Pedagogy and the Impact of Violence and Crisis on Learning

Proposal

After a decade of, at least nominally, civilian leadership, the 2021 military coup once again returned Myanmar to authoritarian military rule. The previous 10 years had seen significant changes in the politics and social infrastructure of the country, including an overhaul of the education system through a new Education Law (2014), National Education Strategic Plan (NESP 2016-21), and the development and introduction of the new Myanmar curriculum framework. These substantial shifts in education were accompanied by much debate, and at times protest, with groups including students, teachers, unions, ethnic education leaders and civil society pushing for radical and inclusive change to stagnant and exclusionary education practices. The contestations surrounding the reforms reflected the commitment and personal investment in education that many felt in diverse constituencies across Myanmar, and the desire for education to better serve the needs and priorities of their communities (Anui & Arphattananon 2021; Lopes Cardozo & Maber 2019).

The military coup of February 2021, however, violently halted the processes of reform, with the leadership of the re-elected National League for Democracy (NLD) and many cabinet ministers arrested and imprisoned. The coup was accompanied by widespread protests across the country demonstrating vehement resistance, which was met with brutal responses on the part of the security forces, including arbitrary detention, assaults and indiscriminate killings. Alongside public demonstrations and protests, a civil disobedience movement (CDM) was launched which saw professionals across the country, including doctors, nurses and teachers refuse to contribute their labour to the illegitimate state. Over 300,000 teachers, roughly three quarters of Myanmar’s state sector teachers, have participated in the CDM, refusing to return to government schools under military control (Reuters 2021; Maber et al 2022). Likewise, teachers, often accompanied by their students, have been prominent participants in protests in towns across the country wearing their distinctive green and white uniforms to make visible their professional, as well as personal, resistance (Frontier 2021).

As the military have entrenched control in the country, initial protest movements have transformed into outright civil war. Underscoring both their resistance to the military regime and their solidarity with their students, many teachers have sought to engage with education in different ways beyond the state, teaching informally or establishing parallel opposition schools. As a result, teachers, students and education sites have increasingly become targets of military assault, with the result that many have fled Myanmar across the border to Thailand. The Thai-Myanmar border regions have long provided a refuge for communities fleeing conflict in Myanmar who have established a variety of education responses to cater to the needs of migrant and refugee learners. Students and teachers, including teacher trainees, fleeing the current violence have joined these communities in seeking to develop alternative education spaces beyond the influence of the authoritarian state. However, these individuals, especially young trainee teachers, have experienced education within Myanmar differently to those communities who have been in Thailand for decades, and as a result create distinctive education responses.

This paper aims to explore this distinctive educational space as a site of resistance and its rejection of state influences, with a particular focus on the curriculum emerging in this space ‘out of place’. We draw from empirical work conducted in 2022-3 in Mae Sot, Thailand, through a series of workshops and group discussions with students and teachers who have fled violence in the wake of the 2021 coup, as well as drawing on the long-standing experience of both authors working in education in Myanmar and Thailand. Theoretically, we propose two novel conceptualisations based on our ongoing research: firstly, drawing from Deleuze & Guattari (2013), we discuss the oscillations and interactions of social space through the interplay of smoothing and striation that occurs in turbulence and displacement. Building on previous work (see for example Maber 2016) we suggest that conflict and displacement create radical and traumatic upheaval that results in an unsettling of social hierarchies. In this space of disruption, education is similarly loosened from many of the striated hierarchies which typically characterise schooling, creating distinctive education practices and relationships that contrast with government controlled formal education. Here, we focus particular attention on the role of curriculum and its development, particularly in the prioritising and sourcing of content to explore underlying formulations of the purposes of education. Secondly, we apply the notion of atopos, being beyond or (perceived to be) out of place (Kennerly 2021), to an examination of the novel curriculum practices that are being developed by teachers and students collectively in this border space. We contrast utopian curriculum ideals with these atopian practices, suggesting that the emerging constructions offer insights for learning about the possibilities and priorities of community-led education in conflict as a site of anti-authoritarian resistance.

Authors: Elizabeth Maber (presenting author) & Ei Thin Zar (non-presenting author)

Authors

• Elizabeth Jane Tregoning Maber, University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education

• Ei Thin Zar, University of Wisconsin-Madison