Originally coming about during HAB's "Craft as Method" workshop in Saint Louis, Senegal, and being further developed in the “Underground Educators of Myanmar and What We Can Learn From Them,” workshop at IIAS in June 2023, this educational workshop had 21 participants from Myanmar and Thailand meet with the facilitating HAB researchers from Northern Illinois University (NIU), Leiden University College (LUC), and Aberyswyth University at the Regional Center for Social Science (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University.

Over the course of the four day workshop, the participants engaged in a variety of activities, supported by lectures throughout that outlined the theories around educational storytelling. The trainees came from a variety of backgrounds, speaking not only English and Burmese but native languages like Kachin, Karenni and Mon. Despite military rule in their respective regions, they shared a common desire to continue providing education in their local communities. 

Activities included individual and group-oriented tasks, such as telling the story of their preferred name and using that story to explain the arc of storytelling, taking a tour of the RCSD and telling a story about their walking trip through sensory mediums (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), conducting interviews with their facilitators and converting them into stories about a place and its student/teacher, among other things. One particular session focused on the trainees' personal objects, with a group of four being assigned as an interviewer, interviewee, and note-takers. While the focus of this activity was to practice the skills involved in recording and sharing stories, these seemingly ordinary objects and the stories tied to them spoke to something deeper. Memories of war, long & arduous journeys from Myanmar to Thailand, lost family and friends evoked feelings of anxiety, trauma, and sadness from all who heard it, and allowed them to connect with each other on an emotional level through these shared experiences. 

By encouraging the trainees to narrate stories about events and places familiar to them & and their community, they had a chance to experience how stories can act as contemporary historical records, as well as a representation of the importance of the local community in student learning. Along with that, they had the practical/logistical experience of seeing how activities like these would be facilitated. This came into play at the final day of the workshop, when the trainees presented their own life stories in a language that they chose. During the workshop itself, trainees who were not as familiar with English and Burmese experienced some difficulty in sharing their stories, and as such the facilitators adjusted to encourage a greater balance of non-Burmese languages. Not only were they able to greater engage amongst themselves, but it allowed for the stories to flow in a way that was comfortable and encouraging, something that they could take away with them when implementing these methods after the workshop's conclusion.

Workshop Schedule 

Day 1. 28th November (RCSD): Introduce storytelling as process and place-based learning as a source of stories
Day 2. 29th November (RCSD): Active listening, interview skills and oral history.
Day 3. 30th November (Payap AM, RCSD PM): Use storyboarding - assemble the story using frames to mark different stages of a story
Day 4. 1st Dec (RCSD). What can we do with ‘storytelling’ and Place-based education?

For more details, check out the workshop program in the Attachments section, as well as "Sharing Stories That Matter: Reflecting on Myanmar Underground Educators".