Teaching through Political Crisis in Myanmar

ELT Teachers’ Challenges, Well-being, and Adaptive Strategies

Abstract

This study examined how English language teachers in Myanmar continued teaching after the February 2021 military coup, focusing on (1) teachers’ challenges in teaching practice, well-being, and resource access and (2) their adaptive strategies for maintaining continuity. The study adopted a critical realist stance and used reflexive thematic analysis, drawing on in-depth semi-structured interviews with six English language teachers who continued teaching Myanmar learners during the post-coup period. The interviews were conducted in Burmese via online platforms and translated into English by the first author. Findings across four themes showed that English language teaching was organized around structural precarity. Teachers worked under infrastructural instability amid blackouts, weak connectivity, and fragile platforms; experienced intertwined emotional and professional insecurity, including financial strain, safety anxieties, and witnessing student harm; and depended on fragile, informally mediated access to materials, devices, and opportunities. In response, they re-engineered pedagogy around interruption through flexible scheduling, multi-channel delivery, semi-asynchronous scaffolds, and targeted engagement strategies while also building informal support ecologies through peer networks and alumni groups. The study offers a practice-proximal account of ELT in a protracted post-coup crisis and shows that continuity depends on teachers’ under-recognized infrastructural, pedagogical, emotional, advisory, and networked labor under highly constrained political and economic conditions.