Vision

To revitalize the positive impacts of Myanmar's universities on their communities by advancing

professional development competencies of university teachers

 

Mission

This project will assist Myanmar's university teachers to 

(1) to develop educational leadership and management competencies

(2) to tackle current educational issues at their universities, and perform better as effective educational institutions

(3) to improve their creativity, innovation, and assessment skills-sets

(4) to practice diversity, tolerance, and multiculturalism in their classrooms

 

Statement of the Problem

University teachers from five remote Border States in Myanmar are currently attempting with

limited resources to equip their students with leadership and cultural dignity. Moreover, the attempt to cultivate a mindset that cherishes diversity and tolerance and takes advantage of multicultural learning environments have been neglected in our education system. Therefore, providing strategies and techniques to the university teachers to combat these issues regarding community engagement and multiculturalism by shedding light on creativity, innovation, and organizational behaviors, will address conflicts and ideological differences among societies.

 

Approaches and Solutions

With two-phases: six three-day initial workshops and the two-day final workshop, we plan to reach

around 216 university teachers from the five remote and underdeveloped border states of Myanmar. Our workshops will provide knowledge and solutions towards cultural issues inside classrooms while boosting teachers' leadership and practicing hands-on skills for diversity, tolerance and promoting mutual understanding. The idea of combining teacher leadership and education empowerment is profoundly crucial as the current relationships between societies from different cultures and backgrounds have not been smooth. And, we feel that the crafting hands of the future, teachers, need to know how to tackle and solve these issues. Therefore, we strongly believe that this innovative workshop project will equip teachers to become change initiators.

At initial workshops, teachers will be introduced with two main themes, Educational Leadership

and Management in Diverse Classroom, with eleven sub-topics. For our final project, we will select the most outstanding 54 teachers from initial workshops, and will bring them together to explore more advanced topics, opportunities, and to share their action plans. The most innovative ideas presented by teachers will be published not only in local journals but also on media such as our project website and the university's' websites.

 

Impacts on Community

Due to the lack of proper investment in higher education over the past decades, university

teachers have long been suffering from the lack of essential skills which consequently leads to demotivation, lacking job satisfaction, and disempowerment. Lack of these organizational behaviors raises problems in effectively managing students and classrooms as well as in communicating and cooperating with peers and administration. We believe that current failures in cultivating students with the mindset of community engagement, diversity, tolerance and leadership have contributed to this shortage of teachers' essential skills.

Thinking from the perspectives of reachability and opportunity, we would like to focus teachers

who are mainly from the remote and underdeveloped border states of Myanmar such as Rakhine, Kachin, Kayin, Shan, and Sagaing. Teachers from the cities of Sittwe, Kalay, Pang Long, Kyaing Tong, Myitkyina, and Hpa-an, have insufficient resources for their career advancements and professional developments. The ultimate aim of our project is to assist teachers from these regions to be able to demonstrate educational leadership and management while successfully practicing multiculturalism inside the classroom.

 

Selection Process

Delegates for the initial workshops will be selected by individual universities. A total of twelve

teachers from each university will be joining the initial workshop. As there are three universities in each city, 36 teachers will join for the initial workshop. 

For the final workshop, there will be 54 teachers from all the universities which ELCM team will

have delivered initial workshops. 3 teachers from each university will be selected according to their participation points, short quizzes, and creative teaching idea pitches during initial workshops and training.

 

Beneficiaries

The primary beneficiaries of our project will be 216 university teachers from 5 remote Border

States in Myanmar. Our targeted cities are Sittwe from Rakhine State, Myitkyina from Kachin State, Hpa-An from Kayin State, PangLong and Kyaing Tong from Shan State and Kalay from Sagaing State. In each city, our project will invite 36 teachers from three surrounding universities to constitute nine teachers from the (Arts & Sciences) University of that city, Technological University of that city, and the University of Computer Studies of that city. These will be our direct benefited population.

Moreover, we have plans to foster and empower these participating teachers to conduct

derivative workshops at their home institutions after our final phase of the workshop. So, we can estimate that a total of more than 540 teachers will also be benefited if 18 university teacher groups organize one derivative workshop each.

 

Evaluation

The core of our evaluation system will include two assessment forms: trainers' performance

evaluation forms, which will serve as a reflection on the instructors' abilities to augment teachers' knowledge, and overall workshop evaluation form which will include before and after knowledge assessment. These surveys will have detailed questions and degree of responses on every aspect we cover during three-day-initial-workshops as well as the two-day-final-capstone workshop and presentation. Moreover, all the surveys will constitute supplementary qualitative questions where teachers will have the freedom to express their opinions out of the limitations of the quantitative questions. Additionally, our team will be using Qualtrics Survey Software for quantitative data, paper forms for qualitative ones. We will engage participating teachers for one-on-one discussion sessions at the end of every workshop day. This will help us understand not only their concerns and feedback during that day but also their further expectations on upcoming days.