Burma/Karen Project

SEAP Outreach has created the Burma/Karen Project in response to the surge of requests for information and training about Burma and ethnic groups such as the Karen, who make up the bulk of the in-coming Southeast Asia refugee population in upstate New York and many other communities in the U.S.

We are committed to providing educational resources on Burma and its many ethnic groups through our lending library and the Burma/Myanmar Explorer Box—a traveling culture kit of objects for use by teachers and community organizations. We also offer professional development workshops for teachers and presentations for community groups and businesses that focus on cultural and historical background.

In fall 2010, we held an 8 week program at Belle Sherman Elementary School in Ithaca, providing weekly Karen language lessons to all of the Kindergaten and First Grade classes. The lessons from each week are posted here as a pdf with audio so that teachers, parents, and students can practice and share what we have been learning. We plan to develop these lessons into a model for other schools to use. For instant access to the lessons, click here to be redirected to webpages corresponding to each lesson. You can also download th eattachments below; just right-click (control-click for mac users) on the attachments to save them to your desktop. 

The Burma/Karen Project Includes:

• Burma/Karen Community Workshop  Hosted on Saturday, May 8, 2010
• Burma Explorer Box Items - Karen and Burmese textiles, Karen alphabet posters and other educational posters, maps, decorative banners, magazines, booklets, puppets, old coins, and much more.
• Karen Children’s Books – Karen children’s books from the Cornell Echols Collection, available online with permission from the publisher.
• Burma/Karen Resource List - SEAP lending library listings and recommended readings
• Teacher Training - In-service and after school professional development presentations are available to help teachers understand the history and culture of this complex country and the diverse ethnic groups that make up its population. As Karen, Chin, and Burmese refugees resettle in the U.S. teachers need to find ways to better understand the backgrounds of their new students as well as ways to help all students learn more about this fascinating part of the world. For more information visit our past teacher training page.                                                                                                      

Essential Web Resources for Burma-Karen Background and Teaching

• Refugees from Burma: Their Backgrounds and Refugee Experiences from the Center for Applied Linguistics. This booklet can also be downloaded free of charge
• Drum Publications: the premeir publisher of texts in Karen, many of which are available for download.
• The Open Society Institute: Burma Project/Southeast Asia Initiative
• Burma: Country in Crisis (a very useful set of “Burma backgrounders”)
• BurmaNet News
• Learning to Listen: A Manual for Oral History Projects (English and Burmese versions) 

Other Useful Web Resources

• Karen Human Rights Group
• The Outer Voices Project
• The Curriculum Project
• Online Burma/Myanmar Library
• http://www.stolaf.edu/people/leming/