Teaching Resources
Authors: Dorothy Guyot , Helen Waller , Win Kyaw
Keywords: Education, International Relations, Myanmar, Political Science, Southeast Asia
How to Cite: Guyot, D. , Waller, H. & Kyaw, W. (2015) “Ideas from a Vibrant Liberal Arts High School in Myanmar”, Education About Asia. 20(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.65959/eaa.1326
For twelve years, the Pre-Collegiate Program of Lumbini Academy has been integrating Myanmar high school graduates into a liberal arts life style. Since its inception, the mission of the Pre-Collegiate Program has been to nurture a small cohort of change-makers each and every year. We are looking to foster students to become perceptive, empathetic, critical, capable, and proactive in engaging the society around them. The first step is sixteen months of education to empower the students to abandon the rote learning of their high school years, and to engage issues and ideas important to their society and the wider world. As the second step, our graduates have matriculated to sixty-seven liberal arts colleges, five US universities, two Canadian universities, three preparatory schools on full scholarships, eight Asian universities, and five European universities. The generosity of these institutions in scholarships is immense, between US $1 and $2 million every year. The third step is the return home of the globally educated students. In this article, we sketch how students learn in the program, how the graduates contribute at college, and how the program facilitates study abroad. How a similar program might be opened under restricted circumstances elsewhere in Asia is explained in the sidebar that accompanies this essay. Our curriculum provides humanities and social science courses— philosophy, literature, and history—as a counterbalance to years of a science-privileging education. We also provide an integrated science class to help students grasp concepts that weave together the facts that they crammed for years. Students take biweekly field trips, contribute weekly community service, hold discussions with people from all walks of life, and host university students from Japan and professionals from America. Peer learning ranges from joint field reports and in-class debates to countless lunchtime conversations on everything from the meaning of life to the efficacy of the new flyover. Teachers and alumni are readily available as additional resources to discuss the students’ questions, which include, but are not limited to:Hello, my name is May Pwint Thair Chu. Please call me May Pwint. Hello, May. I can’t pronounce Pwint. I also think I won’t remember it. I will call you May. Friends, this is Ms. Chu. Thank you for the introduction. My name is May Pwint. Well, it is easier to remember your last name. I don’t have a last name. I have four syllables in my whole name.
At college, I held meditation sessions open to all, five days a week. When my friends saw me in the dining hall, they realized that I skip the veggies and eat lots of meat. They named me,“Here is the meat-eating monk.”
During my first-year writing class, we were talking about how America is peculiar in using the mile as a unit of measurement despite the global switch to the kilometer. I said, “We still use the mile to calculate distance in Burma. See, there are two.”
I asked my host mom and dad why the let their cat sleep with them but not their three-year-old.
Lots of Americans are upset over things they can’t control. The day when Joe Biden was supposed to be our college guest speaker, Hurricane Sandy hit. My friends kept complaining that he should have at least dropped by. I couldn’t get them to calm down.
If some of our alumni study at your college or nearby, they would enjoy helping you make Asia come alive for your students. Figure 1 is a list of the colleges where our students are currently enrolled. Bold type indicates that our alumni graduate in 2015, while an underline means that they will enter in 2015.
In myriad ways, our graduates have contributed intercultural insights into the courses they take. Many professors have invited them as resource people or guest speakers in courses on Asian religions, comparative politics, development economics, and anthropology. Our graduates have written feature articles in campus newspapers and articles in college literary journals. They have selected films for campus showings and have been interviewed for college radio stations. One even worked as a DJ, adding his Burmese perspective about the music he played. The courses students take in the Pre-Collegiate Program empower students to be ready to cooperate in ways they never dreamed possible. Figure 2 is a typical schedule early in a student’s first term.
In the past decade, it has become evident that the Pre-Collegiate Program is a learning community that is able to benefit students and faculty not in the Pre-Collegiate Program and add to their knowledge of Myanmar. For example, the program has twelve years’ experience in hosting students on the Learning Across Borders trips led by Dwight Clark, who founded Volunteers in Asia (VIA) in 1963. He visits Yangon in Myanmar annually with about twenty-five university students from Keio, Waseda, and Tokyo universities (Japan); National Taiwan University; and Chulalongkorn University (Thailand) on a two-week study trip designed to give profound cross-cultural experiences to all participants. Pre-Collegiate Program students escort the visitors in Yangon, visiting community service sites, tourist spots, markets, and other cultural and commercial places. These venues plus lunches and dinners together encourage wide-ranging conversations and, for some, continuing friendships. Dwight welcomes inquiries at dwightcla@gmail.com.
Wesley Hedden, a former teacher at the Pre-Collegiate Program, has created the Sarus Exchange Program. This NGO is a unique form of intercultural learning that draws on the experiences of VIA and of the Pre-Collegiate Program. Sarus educates small groups of Cambodian and Vietnamese university students about issues in their own countries through weekend trips to investigate features of their societies, ranging from orphan care to mangrove replanting. Then, Sarus brings the two nationalities together to learn by site visits and working on a tangible project, such as building a school. Hedden was teaching in the Pre-Collegiate Program when he first got to see and evaluate the applicability of many of the learning activities he still uses today. He welcomes exchanges at wesleyhedden@gmail.org, and for further information about Sarus, visit http://sarusprogram.org/our-staff/.
So what is the takeaway from all this? It is that education like the Pre-Collegiate Program can enable a cascade of learning opportunities for people in a variety of situations around the world. The energy and time put in by the teachers and students of the Pre-Collegiate Program can result in dramatic changes in learning. While in Myanmar, students figure out how to learn on a field trip to a garment factory, while working with an American engineer, and at a school for blind children. At universities abroad, they engage with their peers in personal, poignant, and creative ways. With a formative approach tailored to the academic realities and needs of a particular society, the Pre-Collegiate Program has succeeded in educating part of the world about contemporary Myanmar. We anticipate that Myanmar society will benefit from these graduates for years to come.
