Shoptalk: Refugee Head Teacher Training

November 21, 2010

If you read my previous blog on refugee children here, it was a dark tale. Refugees in Malaysia are seen as illegal and not deserving of protections or services here, such as school. So, Refugee schools in here are officially illegal and the children in the schools are kept hidden in small apartments upstairs where they have to remain quiet, not disturb the neighbors who threaten to turn them in, and are not allowed to play outside or even play loudly inside, to keep them safe.

For me, the hope I feel is seeing these children in school. As Malaysians here say, in their most vulnerable and emotional moments, the schools are where my “heart” is. And, they usually touch their heart when they say that. I’ve seen the most hardened Chinese Malaysian businessman touch his heart, nearly misting over as he described how volunteering with orphans was where his heart lay.

Harvest Centre, the refugee model school and refugee teacher training center I’ve partnered with, and United National High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) planned a Head Teacher Training (Head Teacher = Principals who also teach) recently, and they invited me to train them in child behavior management in the classroom. I was thrilled because my main goal for the first half of my Fulbright was to find a community-based partner and have them see me as a resource, with the ultimate goal being to leave some sort of sustainable intervention behind when I leave. And, to have the opportunity to give an overview of the more in-depth, manualized refugee teacher training we were planning for the spring would allow us to get some buy-in and necessary support from the Head Teachers. And, having UNHCR and Harvest Center directors watch my training helped cement our working relationship.

The Head Teachers were almost all refugees themselves, from all over the world. Most from Burma, but some from Somalia, Afghanistan, and East Malaysia. They all had different ways of being in the group. The Somali teacher was loud, forceful, and very focused on the discussion. A Burmese teacher was soft-spoken and systematic in his speech. There were more men than women, and the women let the men take the lead in discussion. Overall, there was a real feeling of deference to me, as the speaker.

I was limited in time, so only hit the high points, without as much interactive, hands-on activities and role plays as I would have liked. But, I was able to do a role play of how to give a time out to a child. See above for a picture of me putting a head teacher in a time out, which gave them a good giggle. I introduced time outs, along with a few other discipline strategies, as an alternative to using the cane, as described in the previous post.

Discussing caning as a discipline strategy was a sensitive topic and even a tough decision to raise at all. I didn’t want them to only remember a white woman wagging her finger at them over caning, which might be the way they take it since they know we Westerners judge them for it. But, I also didn’t want to avoid the topic completely since it’d be the elephant in the room and truly was the only go-to strategy for certain, if not many, of the schools. Really, at the one school I saw using caning, they used caning for everything – from just getting their attention to back-talk to punishment for physical aggression.

I wanted to introduce options like time outs as an alternative to caning. And, so I brought up caning and made it clear that I wasn’t saying it was good or bad. I mentioned that some teachers seemed to feel it was effective and others felt it was ineffective after a certain point of using it or with certain kids who get much worse beatings at home. I went a bit too far, in retrospect, acting out how the teacher from the previous blog post used it slamming the tables with her eyes bulging out. I think that probably seemed disrespectful, on my part. Then, I explained the alternative strategies like time outs.

I asked the teachers to give me feedback at the end on what was helpful and what was not helpful about my mini-training. I wondered if I’d get some reaction to how I brought up caning. One person, I think it was the Somali teacher, said that he found my discussion of caning unhelpful. He said:

“The least helpful topics is ‘no to use cane.’ If you ever dare to call yourself a teacher you should also dare to use cane when it is necessary. There are times, nothing but cane, needs to be used, but with love and prayer. Then only you are a teacher not a cheater.”

I think I get what he’s saying – that a real teacher, like a real parent, takes the child seriously and disciplines seriously, with authority via the cane. And uses love and religion to guide the use of the cane. I’m still figuring out the “cheater” part. In the end, even though only one teacher said he didn’t like the cane part, I think that in the future I will only touch on the cane briefly, acknowledging it and move onto emphasizing the alternative strategies I’d rather they remember.

Another teacher reacted this way to my discussion of positive reinforcement and ways to get the kids’ attention, by doing fun quick games like Simon Says:

“Sometimes, when the teachers are close and make it fun for the students, the respect of the students to the teachers is getting less…how to get students’ respect even though we make fun and friendly to the students.”

That was a great issue to bring to my attention! I think it may end up being one of the biggest cultural obstacles to their being willing to use more positive ways of managing the kids’ behavior – They fear they’ll lose their authority if they use positive strategies.