Schooling, Identity, and Nationhood: Karen Mother-Tongue-Based Education in the Thai–Burmese Border Region
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
General Comments:
The paper needs review and tightening, with much of the introductory and historical material removed. Further inclusion of contemporary publications on Myanmar’s education systems would give the paper more substance. Likewise, more recent publications on the Karen should be used as sources (see Rachel Sharples, for example). It is recommended the authors review the abstract and introduction and ensure the paper speaks directly to the key themes. In its present form it neither speaks clearly to the history of Karen education or to the current situation or to Karen nationalism and language/culture.
Other recent publications that may be helpful include:
Richard Dolan, ‘Education, Aspiration, and Mobility in the Karen Borderlands : an Ethnography of Youth Transitions Amongst the Kwaegabon Plong Karen of Southeastern Burma/Myanmar by (University of Oxford (United Kingdom) ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2020. 28851267.) and Mikael Gravers , ‘ Disorder as Order: The Ethno-Nationalist Struggle of the Karen in Burma/Myanmar—A Discussion of the Dynamics of an Ethicized Civil War and Its Historical Roots’ Journal of Burma Studies, 2015, Vol.19 (1), p.27-78
The following article Su-Ann Oh, Melanie Walker & Hayso Thako (2019): Karen Education and Boundary-Making at the Thai-Burmese Borderland, Journal of Borderlands Studies, DOI: 10.1080/08865655.2019.1685401 , which is also referenced, provides a much clearer account of the current situation in the cross-border areas than that given in this paper.
Specific notes:
l.6 Inaccurate – the British only controlled part of Myanmar in the early 1800s.
l.8-9 Reword to indicate the ruling military junta closed the schools
l.11 remove the word ‘medium’ or change sentence to indicate it is Karen medium teaching that spread
The entire outline section should be removed.
1.87 Clearly describe what the term ‘Karen medium’ means. Is it Karen language, is it schools that taught a Karen curriculum, is it a Burmese curriculum taught in the Karen language?
l.92 – a word is missing eg ‘describe’? or ‘assert’?
l.92-102 Can you be more specific about when these entities developed into the current-day groupings?
l.103 word missing ‘language’?
l.104 ‘had emerged’
l.105-106 – if still continuing today, what grouping is this? Grouping no 1?
Footnote 3 seems out of context . Maybe place at end of sentence in l.112
l.115 school should be ‘schools’
l.119 conclusion should be ‘conclusions’
l.121 Westfalian- change to Westphalian
l.125 You say has persisted for decades if not longer, but previously indicate the systems have been around since British times – it is necessary to make the time frames more precise.
l.129-130 – there is no evidence for ‘3000 years ago’ – this is a contemporary assertion without sound evidence
The ‘Story of the Karen’ section is largely irrelevant to the paper. Lines 128-156 can be summarised in about 8 lines
l.159 – when mentioning churchgoers – this whole section can be better framed to indicate that the Karen had developed a religious culture that also made them stand out as ‘different’ from the majority in Burma, embracing Christianity as well as practising Buddhism and animism. This is important as Christian beliefs also bring with them a special type of teaching/learning framework. This is addressed in part later in the paper but needs better contextualisation
l.180 ‘and’ should be ‘are’?
l.189-198 are not relevant here
Section b and c can be combined and reduced
l.255 threatened to attack should be ‘threatened with attack’
l.257-261 Again, the time frame needs clarity – much has happened between 1962 and today. This must be made clear, especially since the period of quasi-democracy, the implementation of a National Education Strategic Plan, and now a return to military rule
When arriving at Section 2 (l.296) it would appear that all of the first section outside the introduction would be best deleted save a few key points. Section 2 makes the beginning of the crux of the paper.
l.370 ‘throve’ should be ‘thrived’
l.374-375 – it is a big leap to go from arriving in Mae Sot to developing new pedagogy – this needs to be much more nuanced. Eg ‘Once established the new ‘ministries’ could access international aid including teaching assistance and exposure to more contemporary teaching pedagogies’
l.388 full stop after 1994
l.388-390 – delete sentence – not necessary
l.395 ‘refugees declined’ should be ‘refugees has declined’
l.453 system should be ‘systems’
l.453-454 – but what happened during the years 2011-2020? Burma was not ruled by a ‘military authority’
l.481 America should be ‘American’
l.512 Indiependence should be ‘Independence’
l.682-696 the reference sources are weak here. Much has been written in recent years on the Myanmar education system post independence and post- 1962. The author(s) should consult Marie Lall’s extensive publications on the subject (only co-authored reference is made to Lall’s work).
Author Response
Overall comment: We found Reviewer One's comments extremely helpful. The reviewer obviously read our paper carefully, and thoughtfully.
- We cut some of the detail from the description of the Introduction which did not have specifically to do with schools and nationalism, and moved other parts into footnotes. This shortens the overall length of the Intro, which is good. We do think that this tightens up the overall argument.
- However, as reviewer 2 notes, this is a descriptive paper too, and we think that the detail about the Karen schools with respect to what is taught in literature, Karen society, and second language is also important, so we have not cut as much as we might of there. We also added a comment from Marie Lall about the nationalist content of the Karen curriculum.
3. We have updated references with Rachel Sharples in particular, as well as well as the Gravers article the reviewer mentions. We do not have time to order the Dolan dissertation from the UK (It was not available online). We did make more extensive use of the article by Oh, Walker, and Thako which we too appreciated (one of us a co-author!), quoting it in two places.
Finally, we added references to Karen rap music and electronic media which is coming out of the Karen youth, as described in Charlotte Hill's 2022 articles. This became particularly relevant when theoretical material from Apparudai, Innis, etc., was added at the request of Reviewer 3.
Marie Lall’s recent book on education in Burma is also now cited, and quoted with respect to the Karen. In addition we clarified words about the current situation, even though given the on-going political situation in Burma this remains unsettled.
3). Thank you again for the points about clarity, word choice, etc. We really appreciate the care and attention to detail and have made the suggested adjustments in the text.
Reviewer 2 Report
This an interesting article about the historical development of Karen mother tongue Education.
As the authors recognized, in line 117, the article is primarily descriptive, and perhaps some additional data should be shown to make the piece more scientifically relevant. For example, some figures analysis about Accreditation Programs, Type of students, Pedagogical methodology, Number of students, Success of the study programs, Potential continuity of this teaching, Results comparison between different teaching scenarios …
Author Response
We agree that more tables data would be of interest, but unfortunately do not have ready access in the context of a 10 day turn-around in this response. The other problem is that in response to the concerns of Reviewers 1 and 3, we have decided to make the paper more theoretically focused, by taking out some of the descriptive material (as suggested by Reviewer 1 in particular), and deepening the theoretical discussion, as recommended by Reviewer 3.
Still, the point that Reviewer 2 raises about including more descriptive data is a good one. In developing the response to this paper, we are impressed at the paucity of systematic time-series data describing the development of the Karen school systems since the 1880s.
We think that such data could be developed from existing archives some of which are accessible, despite the recent coup in Burma itself. This is particularly the case with records kept by the Karen education authorities, and other archives in France. But this would probably be more appropriate for a future article.
Reviewer 3 Report
The interesting and under-explored topic makes this paper strongly valuable for the international scientific community. The case study presented exemplifies complex concepts such as the construction of collective identities, community of meanings, collective feeling using both a sociological and historical perspective.
To enrich this interesting theoretical and empirical structure however, it is necessary to intervene on some content and formal aspects.
Concerning the first ones, I invite the authors to put in a clearer way some key-concepts that can be confusing for a reader who is not familiar with this specific cultural and geographical context. For example it would be helpful from the beginning to clarify that you are describing an education system which is not officially recognized and explaining that this counts on the aid of volunteer non-professional teachers.
Moreover I suggest to deepen how religion enters into the conflict and which is the current general political situation/position of Karen in relation to the 2021 coup.
I also invite the authors to not to flatten the theoretical frame only on the work of Anderson or Weber but to enrich the socio-anthropological analysis also referring to other scholars, such as Appadurai (1996) in reference to the role of the imagination and aspiration in the construction of collective projects, or to Innis (1950) about the role of writing in the consolidation of power.
Considering the professional/research background of one of the authors I would encourage him/her to support their thesis by integrating the description of the creation of the Karen educational system with other information from the field which support the effectiveness of this school system in consolidating this imagined community (maybe interview with representatives of the civil society).
From a formal point of view, the paper presents an excessive use of acronyms and translations which make it hardly readable. I suggest reducing those unnecessary (such in the case of names which appear only two or three times) and instead reporting full names in favor of those readers which are not familiar with such a specific context.
Author Response
We agree that this case study illustrates well a variety of theoretical concepts that go beyond Anderson and Weber. We have added a section (Lines 400-449) to the paper that attempts to do this by referring to Appadurai (1996) and Innis (1950), as the reviewer suggests, and also Carr’s book The Shallows, which is a more recent description of how electronic media shapes society.
In the interest of deepening the theoretical approaches, we also added a footnote about James C. Scott’s two books, Seeing Like a State, and The Art of Not Being Governed. There are commonalities (and differences) between Anderson and Scott, though this is not the paper to go into depth on this subject.
Consistent with this request (and also the comments of Reviewer 1, we made reference to Charlotte Hill’s recent articles about the spread of popular rap music among the Karen. On a theoretical level, this also reflects the spread of a specifically Karen consciousness.
We have clarified the professional background of the senior author to emphasize his long association with Karen education as a student, lecturer, and school administrator, and defined this time as “participant observation” in our description of how the tasks on this article were divided up. Beneath all the observations in this paper is this deep “emic” experience.
Given human subjects concerns in a zone where there is a nearby war, and the short time permitted for this review, it is not possible to expand the paper in this fashion.
We have taken out the Karen language terms and with a few transliterations using Roman characters, kept everything in English. There is still a mention of the Karen language sources in the bibliography which we think are important context for the paper. But the Karen alphabet is now removed, as the reviewer seems to advise. The number of acronyms and abbreviations have also been reduced, as reviewer 3 recommended. We hope that this improves readability.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is much improved - thanks for taking on board the reviewers' suggestions. I encourage a final proof read - see line 368 for example. The paper now provides a strong outline of Karen education practices
Reviewer 2 Report
Considerations
The manuscript presents correct information.
