Teaching through Crisis in Myanmar

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

Abstract

This study examines how English language teachers in Myanmar have continued teaching after the February 2021 military coup, exploring (1) teachers’ challenges in teaching, well-being, and resources; and (2) their adaptive strategies for maintaining continuity. Adopting a critical realist stance and reflexive thematic analysis, the study draws on in-depth semi-structured interviews with three English language teachers who continued teaching during the post-coup period. Interviews were conducted in Burmese via online platforms and translated into English by the first author. Findings across four themes show that English language teaching is now organized around structural precarity. Teachers work at the edge of infrastructural stability (blackouts, weak connectivity, fragile platforms), experience intertwined emotional and professional insecurity (financial strain, safety anxieties, and witnessing student harm), and depend on fragile, informally mediated access to materials, devices, and opportunities. In response, they re-engineer pedagogy around interruption, using 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, emotional, and advisory labor in highly constrained political and economic conditions.