Connecting the Curriculum with the Community
After meeting the elders of the community at the village administrator's office, I and my students started looking at ways in which we could reach out to the children of the village.
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After meeting the elders of the community at the village administrator's office, I and my students started looking at ways in which we could reach out to the children of the village.
In order to link the classroom with the real world for the course of Urban Anthropology, our department decided to interact with the community elders to find out about the Taunghtaman Village Tract.
Our group met the village head and community elders of Taunghtaman Village in the village administrator’s office. The elders shared that nowadays most school children who grow up in Taungthaman do not know much about their home village and don't cherish it; and because of this, they are forgetting their cultural heritage.
The school children of the Htantaw village in the Taungthaman Village Tract were asked – What is the most beautiful place in Taungthaman? They could either draw pictures or describe in words. The children drew from their imagination and showed it to the students.
Snacks are important part of a community’s cultural heritage. We included this in our session and served traditional snacks like noe-hta-min or rice mixed with milk.
In (2019-2020) academic year, I teach general anthropology (Anth-1101) to first year students. My idea is to combine the classroom and field trip to show how the concepts of general anthropology that they learned in the class can be connected with "code words" outside of the class room, to begin to show them how to analyze field notes and connect them to theoretical concepts.
Continues from the previous accession card:
Another student interviewed to a girl who is a university student in Yadanabon Univeristy. She said that
This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief.
The seventy-two year old father of the fried-fish seller told us the following story related with the establishment of the U Pein bridge:
"I left the monastery long time ago but I remember what I learnt about the history of the U Pein bridge"
အင်းကအော်ညီး ဆောက်လုပ်ပြီး၊ ဉီးပိန် တံတားကြီး
အင်း၀ရေငံ တွင်းဂျီးစော်နံ၊ တောင်သမန် ရေချိုတွင်း သောက်ပါလေ့ ကို ရန်ကင်း ဘေးရန်က ရှင်း
ဘရူရာဇာ (ထန်းပင်) မည်သော ထန်းပဒေသာပင်များ ခြံရံလျက်ရှိသောနေရာများကို ရွေးချယ်ခဲ့သည်။
This was the first field trip for us and there were many new experiences for us. All of us as first-year anthropology students had never experienced this kind of field trip; and we asked ourselves, ‘What are we going to do?’ We motivated ourselves by asking the question, ‘If we are afraid to ask questions, we will know nothing’.
When we went to the field to collect oral histories or stories or experiences of U Pein Bridge, we did not know how to explain our tasks or talk about them. Our group then applied what we had observed the foreign anthropologist do - smile and make eye contact. We adopted this when we spoke to a fried-fish seller who we first thought may know about something of the U Pein Bridge. First, we bought a pack of fried fish with 2000 Kyat before asking her about U Pein bridge. So, we used our money to get data and we were very happy.
Another female MA student is Ms. Myo Thandar Soe and she began the introduction of cultural anthropology in her presentation.
This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief
In U Pein Bridge, our group interviewed a second-year law student from Yadanabon University which is located near U Pein Bridge. She shared a story which she had learnt from her grandparents:
“We believe that Taungthaman Bo Bo gyi is the guardian spirit of the village. Now there is a pole erected in the middle of the Bridge to mark his death. It is known as Thet-pyauk-taing .
This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief
“There are many beliefs that are linked with Taunghtaman lake and Taunghtaman Bo Bo gyi, our guardian spirit. I was told by my grandparents and we also believe that strangers who visit U Pein bridge should not shower in Taunghtaman lake because the bather will take the place of the one who died before him/her.
According to another belief, if someone misuses the word ‘kyar/tiger’ (an animal which killed the guardian spirit) and then visits the lake... that person dies.
This oral narrative was collected by the students exploring the word concept - belief.
The guardian spirit was once an ordinary man. One day, while he was crossing the strem, he was bit by a tiger or kyar and died. The villagers erected a teak wood pole as a memorial to him and named it Thet-pyauk-taing. And from then on he became Taungthaman Bo Bo Gyi, the guardian spirit.