Train Leaders in Asia for Peace and Sustainability

Dear Faithful Ongoing Donors and Generous One-Time Donors,

Your donations allow us to design and run life-changing courses for young leaders from across Asia. At a time when literally billions are going into the production, sale, and use of destructive weapons, and into the coffers of fossil fuel companies, there is a small but growing number of clear-minded people around the world who are working to solve real problems. We count you among that number. Your donations from now through April of 2023 will enable us to offer scholarships to the young leaders who want to join our School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS) in 2023, because they need the support, because improved English will allow them to write better reports to their donors, because a broader understanding of international relations and the world economy will help them to understand better the climate crisis, and how they can work to bring about change at a time when many world leaders are effectively frozen in greed or in the past.

I will say a little more about our SENS 2023 program and the students who have applied. But I first want to let you know that we just completed our first English Teacher Training Online, which we called SENS LibrETTO. This name deliberately compares teachers to librettists, the writers of the story and the script of an opera. But instead of a fictional drama, the drama is the lives of their students. The whole orientation of the SENS programs, which we shared in the SENS LibrETTO class, is that we teach about everything—the social oppression and the severe ecological changes, for example--that affects our students and will affect them in the future, because we care about them. We teach them to be excellent listeners for each other, and to listen in a way that supports and heals. And we do this all in English, and in this way they learn English quickly and with genuine interest. We compare the teacher to the writer of the script and the story for their own English classes, and our teachers spoke movingly about how they care about their students in ways that go beyond English, and how this changes their teaching.

We are now preparing for our sixth in-person SENS program of three months, and our seventh SENS program if we count this year’s online English program for Myanmar civil society activists. The SENS 2023 program will take place from January 22 – April 8, 2023. In 2020 and 2021, our first Vietnamese students returned home with glowing reports about their experiences in SENS. And as a result we have a large number of applications from Vietnamese students. It has been lovely for me to meet these students in one-on-one interviews. Among those we have accepted is a medical doctor of 26 years old from central Vietnam who works long hours in a public hospital, but also volunteers at a non-profit association that shares accurate information on helpful and up-to-date treatments for common diseases like diabetes, or the problems of the elderly. Our applicants include young women and men who have decided not to follow the conventional path of education, work, and family. Instead, they have pursued alternative paths fed by their genuine curiosity about the world and their purpose in life. We have several young English teachers as well, and we have prioritized them because we know they will carry on our innovative and student-centered approaches to language learning.

We also have a number of applicants from Myanmar. Due to the military coup in their country, they have to do their humanitarian work or civil society support with great care and secrecy. I have recently taught Myanmar civil society activists online, and it is distressing to hear that the director of the grassroots program they work for was arrested simply for accepting money from a non-Myanmar bank account to support their work. The charge? Treason, punishable by long prison sentences under harsh conditions or even death. My students tell me about harrowing experiences passing checkpoints, where any small misstep can lead to suspicions and arrest. Now we have four applicants from Myanmar applying to the SENS 2023 program. This will be a welcome rest for them, but also an enlivening encounter with young leaders from other parts of Asia. They will get to experience the joy of learning with others under a program whose theme this year is: Building a Bridge to Common Ground: (Re-)Discovering the Joy of Learning Together.

We have our first applicant this year from Cambodia, a leading dancer in Cambodia’s first all-gay classical dance troupe, who wishes to communicate the meaning of traditional dance to international audiences. We also have received, and expect more applications from marginalized Dalits in India, and from Indonesian students and teachers. Two of our students in SENS 2020 and 2021 had no intention of becoming English teachers. But their experience in the SENS programs inspired them to consider teaching. They are now doing excellent work replicating and adapting our program to their own home contexts. This year we expect to have a number of applicants who are English teachers, and your donations will indirectly support the transmission and evolution of our own approaches within South and Southeast Asia through them. This is our own small but potentially profound contribution to creating a peaceful world.

We would appreciate it very much if you could think of others who might want to donate to support our programs. Every dollar that comes in through GlobalGiving brings us closer to offering a scholarship to yet another student and to yet another budding teacher who wishes to carry on our work. Our aim is to bring in as many students as we can in SENS 2023, which means 18-20 total.

I cannot share photos from our recent online classes because those photos include the faces of people who encounter security risks not only in Myanmar but also in other countries we work with. Instead, I will share here photos of some of our previous SENS programs, so you can get a sense of the atmosphere that we and the students collaborate in creating every year. In the documents below you will find our brochure for 2023 along with a few “Image Description Projects” from our recent SENS LibrETTO class.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your kind donations. They allow us to keep building on and improving our effective and transformative work. Such work takes time, and we are especially grateful to those of you who have supported us for so long.

Thank you again, and may any blessings and good outcomes that arise from our work reverberate back to you who make our work possible.

Ted Mayer

Designer and Director of the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS)

The SENS program is proud to work under the auspices of the Institute for Transformative Learning of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (The INEB Institute).

Links:

• The SENS Website Page

• SENS 2023 Brochure (PDF)
  
• Selected Image Projects from SENS LibrETTO 2022 (PDF)
  

Dear Friends,

Over the past three months we have continued our work on two key projects, the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS), which provides group classes in-person and online, and One-On-One Mentoring (3OM), which provides online tutoring to individuals or very small groups of students. Many, though not all, of our students are from groups that are facing some kind of existential risk. In the case of 3OM, we generally work with members of ethnic minorities around Asia who face discrimination and limitations on their speech and actions within their home country or region. In the SENS program we have been running a six-week course for students who bravely continue to do community support and humanitarian relief work inside of Myanmar or in the border areas with Thailand. They carry on this work under a brutal military regime that is widely known to hunt down, arrest, and sometimes murder Myanmar citizens who are engaged in work of this kind.

My primary work over the last few weeks has been to teach the six-week course for young Myanmar community leaders. It has been a moving yet also gratifying experience. It is moving because in many ways the students are like students everywhere, wanting to enjoy life, to learn, and to contribute constructively to their communities. Yet at the same time, they face genuine risks to their well-being and safety. Nearly every week at least one student shares that he or she has been forced by local circumstances to move to a safer area. Occasionally there is also news of a friend or colleague who was arrested or even killed. Arrest can be very serious under the current military, as individuals may be detained under harsh conditions for many years or even face capital punishment for engaging in community support. Such is the reality of life under the Myanmar military coup group, who hopes to terrify the Myanmar people into silence.

This group of Myanmar students from various ethnic groups has been fully engaged as we explore English; practices of listening, mutual support, and self-inquiry; the nature of the current world crisis; and life under the military coup. We have budgeted time so that I can meet with students individually to work on their writing projects, and this has been a wonderful way to get to know the students. Recently they all chose an image that they went on to describe in five lines and then in a final paragraph explain why the image is important to them. This was their first experience of preparing and giving a presentation in our online classroom. I learned so much about their lives and circumstances through their choices and their writing!

As for the 3OM project, in the recent period we have continued to accumulate expertise and experience in organizing it to run smoothly and to meet the needs of the students. For example, when two or three people who are already friends learn about our project and request tutoring, we put them in a class together if their English levels and interests are close enough. With three students in one class, each person still receives a great deal of individual attention, yet the class is enriched by the exchange of experiences and the diversity of questions and concerns that arise from a group of three people. Expanding classes in this way allows us to stretch our precious resources, while still conserving the security and intimate ambience of our one-on-one classes.

A final development that I am very pleased about is that we have been seeing more and more cross-fertilization between our different programs. Now, for example, one of our alumni from the SENS 2021 program, a Vietnamese student with excellent English who had started her own online tutoring program, has begun tutoring within the 3OM program. Another alumnus has been taking the concept of SENS and designing online and in-person courses in their home country. They have done so with great creativity, and they have continued to receive a warm and enthusiastic response from their students, who have rarely if ever had the chance to express themselves so freely or to learn with such unabashed enjoyment.

We will be inviting applications from young adults from around the region for our upcoming in-person SENS 2023 program that will begin January 22 and run through April 8 of next year. In addition to inviting young adults with a commitment to working for social and personal transformation, we will also invite 4 to 6 English teachers who will be able to a) benefit through improvements in their own English, and b) learn new and engaging ways of teaching language that they can apply in their home contexts. In this way we hope to make more widely available our approach to holistic, student-centered, socially conscious, and transformative learning through a focus on English, supporting students’ self-confidence and clarity of vision, and strengthening their leadership abilities.

Your donations have been an essential part of enabling this work. Thank you so much for your generosity in these anxiety-filled times. We are working on building durable and long-term connections of mutual support and ongoing learning with young adults from all over Asia as a way to meet the challenge of these times. While facing tremendous pressure to get ahead so as to ensure their personal or familial security and success, these young adults are choosing to support their communities, friends, ethnic groups, and national futures as an important part of fulfilling their own life goals.

Supporting young leaders takes time. So, when a tutor comes to me and asks if they can continue tutoring a particularly promising student, or gather enthusiastic students together for a focused course of a few weeks, your donations allow me to say “Yes” more often. Thank you for making this work possible! 

P.S. Under current conditions we are unable to share photos of our students. For this report I am sharing photos of my online teaching setup. Thank you for understanding!

Links:

• Read More about Our English Programs & How to Apply or Sponsor
• A Recent Update on Myanmar from the Myanmar Mission to the UN