Digital Education as a Resistance Against Oppressive Regime: The Case Studies of Myanmar

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Navigating complexity: Key challenges and trends of comparative and international education across Southeast Asia

Proposal

This presentation follows events of resistance in the context of education after the 2021 military coup d'état in Myanmar. On February 1st of 2021, Myanmar's democratically elected government was overthrown by the opposition military junta. Since then, resistance to restore the democratic government and to counteract the military regime has risen up. According to the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigrants, more than "2.6 million individuals are internally displaced in Myanmar." One of the challenges Myanmar now face is providing education amid all kinds of uncertainty and boycotting education and schooling by oppressive military regime. Drawing from real-world case studies, the presentation highlights creative ways Burmese people have come up with to mitigate and intervene the disrupted education of young people using digital learning as a tool in the effort to promote and further the civil disobedience movement amid education in uncertainty due to the military coup, civil war, oppressive regime, and regional instabilities. It explores three case studies of digital means Burmese resistance has used at three different levels of education--elementary, secondary, and higher education--to provide continuous education. Furthermore, the presentation discusses the contextual factors involved in three different case studies and its impact on how the digital education is delivered differently, informed by the Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems theory. This presentation aims to inform and inspire educators through the analysis of case studies of Myanmar to create their own creative means of using digital education towards equitable and socially-just education systems.

Author

• Han Seth Lu, Harvard Graduate School of Education