Burmese Refugee Schools Pre-Intervention Research: Meeting with Burmese Community Leaders - Coalition of Burma Ethics Malaysia (COBEM)

In 2011, Dr. O'Neal of our Fulbright team took some pictures of one of the more well-funded and functioning Burmese community schools - Chin Women's Organization school. We included these photos to illustrate the Burmese community schools description we give below from our recent September, 2012 meeting with Burmese community leaders about their schools. Note how there is no refugee school sign outside the building, so no immigration police can target their students and teachers.

School director

The Burmese refugee teachers. Note the mural, which is rare at refugee schools. This school has partnered with a wealthy expat private school which has offered some resources like used textbooks and students who came and painted the mural.

Students. Note there are no desks.

There is a fan since it is sweltering. UNHCR gives most of the schools fans.

The students love seeing their friends at school.

Expat private school donated these texts

Clothing made and sold by the refugee teachers and community members to raise funds for their school.

Burmese teacher sewing during school holiday, in order to make clothing to raise school funds.

Expat volunteers come in and teach the students hip hop and tennis, in addition to computers, once every week or so. Almost none of the other refugee school visited had extracurriculars like these. This school was connected to expats in a way that really enhanced their education. Note in this photo that there are not consistent teachers for each class, since many of the teachers have to eek out an illegal living outside of the school in order to survive, so the teachers do not work full-time there, but many often live at the school at night.

September 26, 2012

Our fearless focus group leader, Jennifer, met with Burmese community leaders to get a birds-eye view of the largely hidden Burmese community refugee schools in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- the schools' resources, size, and teacher training. With this information, we can better understand how to help the refugee teachers and students.

Note that there are many more Burmese refugee schools than the 7 schools described below. Burmese refugees make up approximately 85% of the 100,000 refugees in Malaysia. UNHCR-Malaysia has documented a total of 75 refugee informal learning centers, or schools, in Malaysia. Based on those numbers, we could estimate that about 64 of the refugee schools service Burmese students, but there are no clear numbers from UNHCR on how many of the schools reach out to specific ethnic groups. 

UNHCR reported a couple years ago that there are almost 20,000 refugee school-aged children in Malaysia who are not allowed access to Malaysian government schools. Only 30% of school-aged refugees in Malaysia attend these hidden community learning centers (5,200 students), for less than half a day each school day, and only until about the age of 12. There are so many refugee students striving to get an education that the second half of the school day brings in another set of students for the afternoon session. 

Below are notes from Jennifer's meeting with Burmese community leaders. She first documents general observations across Burmese community schools, then she describes 7 specific schools in more detail:

General Burmese community school and student information:

• UNHCR pays teachers RM500 (US$165) only if they have UNHCR cards and if there are more than 50 students in the school. Teachers are required to go for training in Harvest for a year and only after 1 year they get compensation from UNHCR. As such, many teachers are not able to make ends meet and find it hard to survive. 
• The Burmese leaders report that refugee kids tend to stop schooling by the age of 15 in general. We've heard from UNHCR that most of the refugee students cannot get access to schooling past age 12.
• UNHCR does provide textbooks and materials, a start up, and a one-off grant.
• Students face security issues when they go to school – mostly robberies from local Malaysian kids
• Most Burmese community schools waive the fees if families cannot afford it and if the child is an orphan.  
• There are some Burmese learning centres outside Kuala Lumpur – in Cameron Highlands and Penang – but not many and the KL Burmese leaders do not have direct contact with them.

 Information on specific Burmese community refugee schools that COBEM identifies:

Community 1: Kachin Community (Kachin Refugee Committee)

• Two learning centres with 240 students in total, approximately 30-40 students in one class during one session
• 14 teachers (male & females) in two learning centres, 2 male cooks – all personnel are refugees
• Students’ fees: RM50 for primary school, RM70 for secondary school. Fees include 3 meals and transportation costs.
• Teachers lack experience and ability. Most have not received any training after the basic Harvest Centre training.
• Courses taught are fixed by UNHCR and NGOs 
• Rent for the centres are paid by the church – but bills are paid for by the communities.

Community 2: Chin Community (Chin Refugee Community)

• Not too sure exactly how many students or teachers in the school but teachers have expressed that they are short of staff as many have been resettled in the last few months.
• Teachers function independent from the community
•  Currently the main need for the school is a field and to cover the premises' rental fees
• Students fees: RM30-40

Community 3: Arakan Community (Arakan Refugee Relief Community)

• 1 Learning centre with 60 students
• 2 permanent teachers but only one gets a constant pay from UNHCR, 2 part time volunteer teachers
• Classes are often overcrowded and so they organize outings just to get them out of the classroom
• Due to the overcrowding, student encounter a lot of Health problems – including flu, fever
• Education programs are developed by the community

Community 4: Shan Community (Shan Refugee Organization)

• Only about 10 students in the community as most of the have been resettled
• The only classes they have are Chinese and Shan language classes
• There are no able teachers in the community to teach other subjects such as maths, science, English.
• Teachers do not get an income from UNHCR

Community 5: Mon Community (Mon Refugee Organization)

• 1 learning centre with 60 students
• 5 refugee teachers but all are unregistered with UNHCR and have no experience teaching the subjects they have been assigned to teach. An NGO in Ampang also provides part time teachers.   
• As the teachers are unregistered they receive no remuneration from UNHCR and are not interested to teach as they are trying to make ends meet themselves. At times they do not turn up for classes. 

Community 6: Karen Community (Malaysian Karen Organization)

• 1 learning centre with 80 students
• Teachers are not qualified; Students are Grade 1-5
• Students are not able to speak and write English or communicate with the teachers

Community 7: Karenni Community

• School mainly for adults
• Subjects include: English communication skills, grammar and vocabulary, speaking and listening
• Textbooks come from UNHCR
• Teachers are not registered with UNHCR and all provisions are from the community itself

Community 8: Chin Community (Alliance of Chin Refugee)

• There are 17 communities under this alliance with 1400 students
• One learning centre to provide rep – has 174 students
• Teacher compensation is low so many people in the community prefer to go into other professions and the schools face problems in attracting qualified teachers due to this low compensation

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.