Place-Based Education and Community Storytelling

Since the 2021 military coup, many students have been boycotting what they call ‘military slave education’(စစ်ကျွန်ပညာရေး or sit kyun pyinyayay). The World Bank (2023) estimates that only 22 percent of eligible students are enrolled in high school level studies in Myanmar. The educational crisis is particularly severe in ethnic autonomous areas along Myanmar’s borders, as well as in heartland areas such as Sagaing, where ongoing armed resistance is most intense and where the coup reinvigorated socio-economic marginalisation and cultural-political oppression.

This idea first emerged during HAB’s international “Craft as Method” workshop in Saint Louis, Senegal. At the workshop, Tharaphi Than from Northern Illinois University (United States) shared photos of students watching educational videos in caves to access non-military education. The photos were meant not merely to elicit sympathy, but rather to serve as a call to action. How can we respond collectively and support these individuals? Surajit Sarkar, an oral historian from Delhi (India) shared his work on community storytelling as a pedagogical resource with attending scholars, including Tharaphi and Jyothi Thrivikraman from Leiden University College (the Netherlands). In the following months, Yi Li from Aberystwyth University (United Kingdom) joined the effort, and a consensus was reached to organise training workshops for teachers from Myanmar.

Thus, in June 2023, the workshop “Underground Educators of Myanmar and What We Can Learn From Them” took place at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Subsequently, a five-week online course was held in October-November 2023, supported by The Worlds We Want (TWWW) research hub at Aberystwyth University. Through these events, we gained valuable experience in facilitating training activities and designing course materials. We paid particular attention to the special requirements of Myanmar teachers who asked for tailored, accessible content and activities, methods to encourage discussion among members of different backgrounds, and materials with a mixture of English and Burmese languages. This culminated, most recently, in an intensive, in-person, four-day training workshop, “Community Storytelling and Place-based Education: Learning with Memory Workshop.” 1 This event was supported by CLAS summer grant at Northern Illinois University, HAB, Aberystwyth University, Leiden University College, Thinking Classroom Foundation, and Chiang Mai University. The workshop took place at the Regional Centre for Social Science (RCSD), Chiang Mai University, between 28 November and 1 December 2023, with four facilitators and 21 trainees living in Myanmar and Thailand.

The trainees were diverse in terms of region, religion, ethnicity, profession, age, and gender. Yet, despite the huge differences, they shared a common vision of resisting military rule by continuing education in their respective communities. Many participants were in their 20s and had thus endured disruptions to their own tertiary education in 2021. Since then, they have led a volatile, and sometimes precarious, life in the resistance movement. For them, the Chiang Mai workshop was their first time back on a university campus. The normality itself was overwhelming, and their dedication to this learning opportunity – especially while undergoing personal and collective traumas – was humbling. In an activity on the first day, we organised a short campus tour with specific tasks, and these young participants were clearly enjoying the walk, not only as a group activity aiming to practise the development of place-based materials, but also as an immersion in normal campus life with peers.

For this hands-on workshop, much effort was dedicated to activities, which were supported by short ‘lecture’ sessions outlining necessary theories and context. This was vital for keeping the thread focused, and to avoid trainees becoming confused and overwhelmed. Each day, two or three individual or group activities were conducted either inside the classroom or on-site (e.g., the campus tour). Such activities were guided by various prompts, including ‘tell the story of your name,’ ‘draw a map between your home and the market,’ and ‘storyboard a recent visit.’ All of this enabled the trainees to experience storytelling and place-based learning in a multi-sensory manner, as well as to see first-hand how teachers facilitate and navigate these sorts of pedagogical activities. 

One session was based on trainees’ personal objects. This proved to be particularly moving and opened up space for the students to discuss their own personal histories, but it also highlighted the power of stories about place. In this activity, groups comprised four trainees, each one of whom was assigned a role: one interviewer, one interviewee, and two note-takers. Here, interviewees, upon the guided prompts of the interviewer, answered questions about an everyday object brought to the workshop. The focus of this activity was practising interviewing, observing, and sharing stories. Each role in the group emphasised certain skills.  The outcome of this two-hour exercise was a collection of simple yet moving stories associated with their recent lives and with strong emotional resonances.

As a training workshop dedicated to marginal communities, the use of language in the classroom is not only a communication tool but a symbol of power, dominance, and differential access to knowledge. Indeed, beyond the dichotomy of English and Burmese, there were undercurrents of sub-power associated with non-Burmese languages among ethnic trainees, whose own native languages such as Kachin, Karenni, and Mon were hardly represented in the classroom. This dynamic reflected the linguistic and ethnic complexity in Myanmar in general, and indeed among many resistance groups on the ground. To acknowledge the gap and to give voice to the trainees, facilitators quickly adjusted the language strategy and left the final assignment on the fourth day to be led entirely by trainees themselves. Here, each trainee presented a story of their own life, in a language chosen by themselves. This proved a great boost to classroom participation and engagement. Each person gave a passionate story that was close to their heart, igniting discussion on the topic and on storytelling techniques – much to the appreciation of the facilitators, now taking a backseat in order to let the stories and thoughts flow in the most comfortable way for all. Facilitators sat to the side of the room and had the stories translated (by an assistant on the computer so that live translation was happening in the background); we interjected as necessary but most of the feedback came from the participants themselves.

The four-day workshop concluded with trainees expressing their positive learning outcomes and their willingness to apply these newly learned methods within their respective communities. Stories generated during the sessions will be compiled, translated, and published as alternative learning materials, and the publication will also serve for the rest of the world as a valuable record of the hopes and struggles of a young generation from Myanmar. The training protocol will be developed as a toolkit for educators in conflict/displaced areas. The workshop in the tranquil campus under the revered and beautiful Doi Suthep of Chiang Mai city provided a much-needed occasion for these young, dedicated activists to cultivate new connections and new friendships, and to resume – even if temporarily – a life that was cruelly denied to them by political repression.

The Chiang Mai workshop and its aforementioned preparatory sessions have been an invaluable learning process for everyone involved. The inspiration was mutual, and we facilitators have learned as much as the trainees, if not more. While community storytelling and place-based education have been implemented in locations across the world over the years, the key issue is to sensibly adjust to each community with its unique needs. As scholars with mixed experiences in the Global North and South, all of us have previously worked with communities at the margins, both in our research and our practice. Yet in implementation, we are often affected by institutional habits that have been dominated by the North despite conscious efforts to adjust otherwise. Taking this further, and incorporating the twice-daily course correction feedback, the language of the workshop switched to Burmese on the last day, forcing us facilitators to follow and respond through the human and digital translation services available. This handed over the space in multiple ways to the participants, an act so empowering that many participants mentioned it in their feedback, and so did we as organisers.

The possibility of developing place-based stories – and of helping participants draw out psychologically fragile and traumatic experiences from the violence and displacement of their lives – made this workshop unique. For example, the sounds of aeroplanes and fireworks (it was the annual Loy Krathong festival in Thailand) made some initially fearful. It was evident that participants were trying to process their recent pasts in their own ways in the relative security of Chiang Mai. Why should stories of hurt, suffering, even death need to be told?  Did they matter? How should they be told? This emerged a number of times among the participants themselves. Such questions gave trainees time to process their thoughts and words, while we facilitators tried to reassure them that this was legitimate, that their stories do, in fact, matter. The challenges they face will persist, but so will their struggle to continue fighting for a better place. And throughout the four days, we had difficult conversations about language, power, and privilege amongst the group. These discussions were needed, and we must sit in spaces of uncomfortableness to unlearn and learn. We don’t know what the future holds for these participants. They may not know either. But our small actions made a difference, and perhaps that is all for the moment. And perhaps this is a call for us all to find the power in small actions. 

Epilogue:  Three months after the workshop, participants are working as groups, compiling stories from their communities, finding ways to incorporate them into teaching and public education. Our workshop has an intangible outcome: empowering the participants to see that their world is knowable, and that it is worth knowing by people beyond Myanmar. 

Yi Li is Lecturer in East and South East Asian History at Aberystwyth University, Wales, UK. Email: yil10@aber.ac.uk

Surajit Sarkar is Curator at Kerala Museum, Kochi (India) and former Associate Professor at Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University Delhi. Email: surajit.sarkar@gmail.com 

Tharaphi Than is Associate Professor at Northern Illinois University, Faculty of World Languages and Cultures and Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Email: tthan@niu.edu

Jyothi Thrivikraman is Assistant Professor at Leiden University College the Hague, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University (Netherlands).  Email: j.k.thrivikraman@luc.leidenuniv.nl

All object stories translated from Burmese to English by HWM.