Rehearsing Federalism from Below:

Community Agency and Education Governance in Post-Coup

Myanmar

This seminar is an online event via Zoom

Date: October 27, 2025 (Monday)

Time: 06:00 – 07:00 PM (Melbourne Time)

          02:30-03:30 PM (Myanmar/Yangon Time)

Join Zoom Meeting: please click here

Meeting ID: 896 6683 9791

Passcode: 522994

The AMI seminar on 27 October is to be delivered by a special guest speaker, with a response from Joseph Lo Bianco, a Q and A and then an open session. Our speaker is an education and policy practitioner from Myanmar with many years of experience advancing multilingual and Indigenous education in conflict-affected regions. She helped found the Rural Indigenous Sustainable Education (RISE) movement, served in program and advocacy leadership roles, working with 18 ethnic education partners across Myanmar and along the Thailand and Myanmar border to co-design community-led schooling and teacher support systems.

Her work has focused on building democratic, pan-ethnic network governance models that bring diverse Indigenous and non-state actors together to set shared priorities, embed local languages and cultures in learning, and transform community insights into policy and systemic change. She is a terrific speaker, and the session promises to be a rich and engaging one.

The AMI speaker’s expertise has been in ethnic-education with 12+ years’ experience  advancing multilingual and Indigenous schooling in Myanmar’s conflict-affected regions. A former co-founder, Program Director, and Technical Advisor at Rural Indigenous Sustainable Education (RISE), her practice is rooted in a bottom-up approach. She co-designed and co-implemented programs with 18 diverse Indigenous/ethnic education stakeholders and non-state actors across Myanmar and the Thailand–Myanmar border, using a democratic, pan-ethnic network-governance model to set shared priorities, embed local languages and cultures in learning, and turn community insights into policy and system change.

The speaker has been closely involved in Myanmar’s national education reform processes, helping channel the voices of multi-ethnic stakeholders into sector coordination and planning. She served as Co-Chair in multiple national education platforms, including Ethnic Education in States and Regions and Education Sector Group, National Education Sector Plan Review Taskforce. She contributed to both phases of the National Education Strategic Plan—Phase 1 (2015) and Phase 2 (2020)—by convening multi-ethnic leaders to review and refine policy recommendations for an inclusive and representative education policy in Myanmar Her applied research includes co-authored studies on equitable teacher stipends and community-teacher support. She has presented internationally on the recognition of ethnic education systems; culturally responsive and contextualised schooling; teacher competency frameworks; Education Management Information Systems (EMIS) and data-driven decision-making; teacher management in crisis and conflict contexts; and federal-democracy education policy.

Now based in Melbourne, she is completing a Master of Public Policy & Management at the University of Melbourne. Her current capstone minor thesis examines how language policy in a multilingual Myanmar can support an inclusive federal democracy—advancing her goal of building context-responsive education systems that reflect local identities and foster social cohesion.

A question and answer session will be conducted after the talk.

For more information about AMI, please visit: aummi.edu.au/.