From December 2019 to March 2020, John Bowen was a Fulbright US Scholar in the Department of Geography at Yadanabon University in Mandalay, Myanmar. While in Myanmar, John taught two sections of introductory human geography and one section of descriptive statistics. John invited his former colleague and fellow geographer, Heike Alberts, to visit him in Myanmar. While there Heike gave several guest lectures and observed other classes. Both John and Heike interacted extensively with the faculty, staff, and Master’s students at Yadanabon University. In this photo essay, we recount some of our experiences and impressions of teaching geography and travelling in Myanmar, the “Land of the Pagodas”. We end by briefly addressing the implications of the recent military coup in the country.
Both of us found teaching in Myanmar to be challenging but also profoundly rewarding. The classrooms were often hot, crowded, and cacophonous; the electricity supply and instructional equipment were unreliable; and the language barrier was formidable. Yet the students were warm and engaged, and our hosts were endlessly gracious. John, who was in the country longer, learned a little bit of Myanmar, including a phrase that helped to draw out our students: အမှားပြုလုပ်ရမှာကိုမကြောက်ပါနဲ့။, meaning "do not be afraid of making mistakes". We adopted a similar attitude in undertaking our adventure in Myanmar.
Mandalay was the royal capital of Burma in the middle of the 19th century until the British consolidated their control of the territory. Today it is the second-largest city in Myanmar and remains vitally important as a Buddhist pilgrimage center. In this photo from the top of Mandalay Hill, some of the city's numerous pagodas are visible in the foreground while the Irrawaddy River, the lifeblood of Myanmar, lies in the distance.
Families organize ornate processions to bring children to monasteries. Buddhist boys in particular are expected to serve briefly (e.g., a couple of weeks) at least once as a novice in a monastery, making the donation ceremony a rite of passage. The picture above comes from a procession that also featured dancers, musicians, and several elephants. Such a parade might cost the family as much as several thousand US dollars. The rich rice-growing landscape that surrounds Mandalay is visible in the background.
Pink-robed Buddhist nuns are a common sight in Mandalay and much of the rest of Myanmar. Here a group of nuns moves through a neighborhood on their early morning alms-round, collecting food for the day. The practice of alms-giving frees monks and nuns from daily concerns and encourages humility. Those who give earn merit. Monasteries and nunneries are not just prominent features of the Myanmar's built environment but also its soundscapes. Loudspeakers frequently broadcast prayers and sermons throughout surrounding neighborhoods, sometimes even in the middle of the night.
A group of colorfully attired girls ask a monk to take a photo at Mandalay Palace. The palace was home to the last two kings of Burma before the British toppled the monarchy in 1885. Today the center of the former palace is a popular tourist destination, though some Myanmar writers (e.g., Thant Myint-U 2011) have criticized the quality of the 1990s-era restoration completed under the country's former military regime.
Among the most populous games in Myanmar is chinlone, a game in which a cane ball is kicked back and forth among a small group of players, somewhat like hacky-sack. Monasteries are not just about fun of course. For some of the poorest families, the monastery is a primary source of education. And some monks stay for life, devoting themselves to the country's dominant religion.
In contrast to the antiquity of many of the country's monasteries, universities in Myanmar are a newer feature of the landscape. Yadanabon University was established in 2000 and like many other higher education institutions in Myanmar it is situated on the edge of an urban area. With few public transport options available, students at Yadanabon University mainly drive motorcycles to and from campus (most students live in the city of Mandalay). A new 150-cc Chinese motorbike costs the equivalent of less than $400.
Yadanabon University is a public university (indeed, all universities in the country are government-affiliated) with about 20,000 students, including about 500 in Geography (more than 400 undergraduate and 50 graduate students - a handful of whom are pictured with John above). The university is heavily subsidized so that tuition for a student amounts to about $8 per year.
The faculty at Yadanabon University is strongly hierarchical. In the Geography Department there are always two professors, four associate professors, and then various ranks of lecturers. Advancement is principally according to seniority, not research output or teaching performance. Most of the faculty and staff at Yadanabon University are female.
Each cohort of students (first-, second-, third-, and fourth-year undergraduates and first- and second-year Master’s students) has its own classroom, and professors come into the classrooms to teach their classes. The classrooms are equipped with wooden benches with attached tables. As many as five students have to squeeze on one of these benches when attendance is high, but through most of the semester attendance rates are often low.
The official language of instruction at Yadanabon University is English, but many students struggle with English fluency. The language barrier and enormous difference in stature between students and faculty inhibited American-style classroom participation when John or Heike taught. From what we observed, a lot of the teaching in Myanmar consists of people repeating after the professors or reading out passages from the class booklet together. Particularly as final exams approached, the campus reverberated with the sound of students in building after building loudly reading together from their booklets. The photo also shows the manner in which male and female students sit in different parts of a classroom. The gender segregation was again observed at communal meals, with males and females sitting on opposite sides of the table, and on the staff bus where males and females rarely shared a seat.
Most classrooms had roughly finished concrete floors, so both students and instructors wore shoes. However, if a room (whether classroom or office) had any kind of improved floor (carpet or tile), shoes were left outside the room as a sign of respect, so teaching and learning then took place barefoot. The GIS Lab was one such room. Shoes were also taken off when entering any kind of religious site (such as the numerous pagodas in Mandalay) or people’s homes.
The classrooms at Yadanabon University lack instructional equipment beyond a whiteboard and blackboard. To make it easier for students, most of whom had difficulty understanding spoken English, John and Heike generally used PowerPoint with ample text on the screen to teach. Since the department had only two projectors and screens, each class meeting required a small platoon of students to carry the projector, screen, a heavy backup battery (sudden power outages were common) and extension cords from the head’s office on the second floor to a classroom on the third floor. Given our status as foreign visitors and teachers, the students gladly performed this service.
Students work together easily on class projects and are quick to help one another. Occasionally the collaboration is too close. For instance, in John's human geography class students were each given a different country’s demographic data and asked to draw and briefly interpret the country’s population pyramid, but they often copied one another’s interpretations. So, for instance, one student provided the same explanation for a pyramid for Bulgaria as another student wrote for the very differently shaped pyramid for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The students at Yadanabon University seemed to have little knowledge of the world beyond Myanmar, but they had a keen appreciation of Myanmar's geography. Early in the semester, John asked the human geography students to make a mental map of the country. The maps varied in quality, but one striking consistency was the prominence of rivers in their depictions.
At the beginning of January, each second-year Master’s student presented three possible topics for their Master’s thesis, from which the faculty then selected one for the student to pursue. Heike and John actively participated in this daylong event. The range of topics was rather narrow, usually limited to agricultural or urban topics, with the township as the scale of analysis (Myanmar is comprised of 330 townships). On the other hand, the students were excited about the potential for their research to make a difference in an under-studied country.
On Mondays and Fridays, faculty and graduate students at Yadanabon University wear a standard uniform featuring blue longyis, a wrap-around skirt knotted in the front for men and on the side for women. Male faculty also typically wear a cotton jacket and collarless shirt as John is wearing here.
Master’s students stand to greet the teacher. Most wear the blue longyis that are considered the university uniform for faculty and graduate students – bright blue for women and a light blue-checkered design for men. Note that people in the library are barefoot. Even when the temperatures climbed into the high 30s Celsius (90s Fahrenheit) in late February and early March, no one on campus wore shorts except students doing some sort of physical exercise such as playing volleyball.
Teachers are revered in Myanmar; in the country's predominantly Buddhist culture, teachers have a status roughly equal to one's parents and monks. Male and female teachers are referred to with the title “saya” and “saya ma”, respectively, meaning teacher; higher-ranked faculty (e.g., full professors) have a longer title: “saya kyi” or “saya ma kyi” meaning “big teacher”. The reverence for teachers is expressed most powerfully during homage ceremonies when students kneel before a teacher in much the same posture as before a Buddhist image in a pagoda.
The faculty, staff, and students were especially excited to share their country’s rich Buddhist culture. One afternoon a group of faculty and students piled into a pickup truck (with most sitting in the bed) to head to the Jade Pagoda south of Mandalay. Students and faculty explained lots of details to us and took dozens of photos with us which (like any other photos taken during our visit) were quickly shared on Facebook.
In 2010, the proportion of people in Myanmar with mobile phones and the proportion with access to the internet were lower than almost anywhere other than North Korea. Then in 2013 the government opened the country to foreign mobile phone providers. Now, the number of mobile phones per 100 people is nearly as high as in the United States. The proportion of people in Myanmar who regularly use the internet has also grown very rapidly to about 40 percent.
A pilgrim at Yangon's Shwedagon Pagoda pours scented water over a Buddha statue. This ritual is believed to bring blessings to the devotee. The government of Myanmar has placed the pagoda on a tentative list of World Heritage nominations. Myanmar's two existing World Heritage sites, Bagan and the Pyu Ancient Cities, are also related to the country's rich Buddhist heritage.
Peik Chin Myung Cave is a limestone cave complex near the highland town of Pyin Oo Lwin. Over the past three decades, the complex has been filled with numerous Buddhist stupas and is today a popular attraction. On the day we visited, along with many tourists there were groups of monks and nuns from Cambodia, Vietnam and other parts of the Buddhist global community. The combination of an ancient faith with new technology illustrates commingling of old and new in contemporary Myanmar.
Much improved in Myanmar after the country turned towards democracy and greater openness in 2011, but the educational system remained hobbled by significant weaknesses. Myanmar geographer Aung Than (2018) recently wrote that geography teaching materials must be updated, geography as a discipline must address Myanmar’s contemporary problems, foreign publications must be made available, memorization must be replaced by other teaching methods, and critical thinking must be encouraged (see also Eschborn and Göth 2018; Hayden and Martin 2013). The fact that we were permitted to visit and teach without any restrictions at Yadanabon University was one small sign of the positive changes in the country.
Regrettably, Myanmar's positive trajectory in matters small and large has been severely imperiled by a military coup that began on February 1, 2021. At the time of this writing, it is impossible to know how the coup will unfold and what its ramifications will be for higher education in the country, but the early indications are distressing. The military has arrested and used force against protesters, including many students and university staff; soldiers have entered campuses across the country; a university rector in Mandalay was forcibly seized; and a university student in Naypyidaw was the first person reported killed by the army since the coup began (Lau 2021). Myanmar's universities were already largely shut down by the COVID19 pandemic, and now the coup has led to further severe disruptions in the country’s educational system.
We hope that the courage of students and faculty and that of thousands of other Myanmar people who have taken to the streets, in tandem with the international condemnation of the coup and sanctions against its leaders, will force a return to the path towards democracy and openness. We certainly benefited from the open welcome with which we were met, and we believe our hosts benefited, too. Unfortunately, in the wake of the coup, Myanmar is isolated once more as the internet has been repeatedly cut-off by the authorities and most flights have been suspended. We join with those who have called for end to the coup. Myanmar, the "Land of Pagodas", has long been a place linked to distant peoples and places. We look forward to the resumption of the country's connections and the exchanges of which we were happy to be a part.
John thanks the Fulbright Program for funding his US Fulbright Scholar grant and the Institute of International Education in Washington, DC and the US Embassy in Yangon for supporting him while in Myanmar. John and Heike are profoundly grateful to the faculty, staff, and students of Yadanabon University for their hospitality, generosity, and collegiality.