Second Focus Group: How do Burmese Refugee Teachers Manage Behavior, Attention and Emotions in their classrooms?

Discussion group from 2011 with Burmese refugee teachers. We were not able to take a photo of this current focus group discussion participants.

 October 6, 2012

How amazing to get 9 Burmese refugee teachers together to do our second refugee focus group! They were very honest about the challenges they face, along with how they foster hope and motivation in both themselves and their refugee students.

Our ultimate goal with these refugee teacher focus groups is to understand how we can best help the refugee teachers manage their refugee students' behavior, attention, and emotions.

Focus Group Results: 

Sample: The Burmese ethnic minority classifications of the 9 refugee teachers were: 1 female Kachin, 1 male Karenni, 1 female Karen, 1 male Mon, 2 male chin, 1 male Arakan, and 1 female Shan, and 1 male Shan. There were at least 12 different "informal learning centres" (refugee schools) represented at the focus group, with some participants working at more than 1 centre. It was observed that the stronger English speakers in the focus group tended to dominate the discussion, and, given the predominance of males and some cultural pressures, men dominated the focus group discussion too.

Themes:

Burmese Refugee student emotions, attention, and behavior:

• ANGER

• Shame

• The students feel useless and very HELPLESS when it comes to helping their families

• Teachers feel helpless or unable to understand the emotions of their students – QUOTE on in our culture we do not focus on feelings

• Teachers think of student attention in terms of  students either listening and being slow/fast learners

• Students sometimes stare blankly at the chalkboard 

• Teachers lose the attention of their students easily since it is hard to keep students occupied with activities in class

• Teachers seem to have trouble answering what emotions the students experience, explaining that open discussion of emotions is not encouraged in Burmese culture:

"[Our Burmese community teachers and students do] not focus on such feelings as it is not our culture to do so. We as teachers cannot control our students’ emotions because it is not our culture to do so. We focus on the subject matter and we run the school to teach them for their future." (Community refugee school teacher)

 
Issues raised around Burmese Refugee Teacher Behavior, Attention, and Emotion management:

•          HOW MOTIVATE STUDENTS? What incentive do they have to study?

• Respect: 

• It is very important to the teachers that the students respect them

• The teachers do not want to lose respect by being too positive in their behavior management

• The teachers feel a struggle between being too strict and too lenient

Teacher Classroom Management Strategies of Students' Behavior, Attention, and Emotions:

• Prioritizing needs is necessary given overcrowding in their classes

• How give individual attention to the many needy students?

• Teachers feel guilt and frustration over not being able to meet all students’ needs

• Give students responsibilities in class like helping with cleaning up the class

• Corporal punishment is commonly used by the refugee teachers, and they grew up with their teachers in Burma using punishment with them.

• Positive management strategies brainstormed/discussed:

• Meditation

• Positive rewards

• Skills training for students

• Relationship-building with teachers

• Instilling hope in students for the future 

• Peer mentorship of students at lower grade levels

Teacher Stress and Self-Care:

• Teachers are living the life of refugees themselves, which adds a lot of stress to their being able to function as focused, attuned teachers 

•  Self care 

• Religion and prayer

• Motivations like love of community

• Personal affirmations

• Sharing of problems

Recommended next steps:

• Choose which refugee schools and ethnic groups to focus on

• Visit to the refugee target schools 

• Build relationships with target schools

• Recruit refugee teachers for training and consultation

• Include cultural and belief systems in training

• Help teachers identify student emotions

• Collaborate with and train them in how to help students identify and manage their emotions?

• Acknowledge teacher resentment and frustration combined with hope and determination

In the best of all possible worlds, we can design an ideal, culturally-attuned refugee teacher training program, but fundamental basic educational needs need to be met, like school resources, access, classroom size, food, etc.: “Teacher training is more focused on the teaching methods. However as you know, our teaching is not effective due to some outside factors such as the school building is not enough.” (Community refugee teacher) Teacher training cannot tackle insurmountable obstacles posed by countries hostile to refugees, and training may not be effective in improving refugee students’ futures without improved refugee rights and conditions in Malaysia.