Myanmar children’s play and resilience: analyses of Myanmar teacher candidates’ digital photo essays

ABSTRACT

The current study examines how Myanmar teacher candidates make sense of children's play using the analyses of the digital photo essays they created. This study aims to shed light on Myanmar children’s play and resilience within the community. Drawn from the interpretative engagement framework, the visual and contextual analyses indicated multiple risk factors that affect Myanmar children’s resilience, such as child neglect, unsafe play areas, and a gap between the Western play-based curriculum and local practices. However, we notably found community resilience in images of children’s traditional play, such as Kyak Hpa Khut, which enables children to be responsible for protecting community members from incoming danger. Finally, the implications for utilizing digital photo essays to understand children’s play and their resilience within indigenous cultural settings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Myanmar children
• risk factors
• play
• community resilience
• interpretative engagement framework
• digital photo essays

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Youn Jung Huh

Youn Jung Huh is an associate professor of Childhood Education and Care at Salem State University. She received her Ph.D from Arizona State University. She has worked extensively in the areas of digital technologies for teacher preparation and young children’s play. She is also an Early Education and Care program coordinator at Salem State University with experience developing the program and training teacher educators.

Boo Young Lim

Boo Young Lim is a doctoral student and a research assistant at the University of Oklahoma. Boo Young had worked for a teacher preparation program in Myanmar. As a program coordinator, she developed and modified the teacher preparation program with the Myanmar Department of Social Welfare. She is interested in teacher education, technology integration and culturally responsive teaching. She published articles in the areas of implementing strategies for Official Development Assistant (ODA) in early childhood education and cross-cultural, culturally responsive pedagogy.

Haesung Im

Haesung Im is a assistant professor at Duksung Women’s University. Her research interest lies in the cross-cultural investigation of children’s learning experiences at preschool, developing a teacher preparation program for culturally responsive pedagogy. She published several articles on cross-cultural pedagogy in early childhood at journals such as Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, and Journal of Research in Childhood, Studies in Educational Evaluation, Youth and Care Forum, and International Journal of Early Childhood Education.