Curriculum Development

ZEWG representatives decide to develop their own curriculum for the following reasons.

• Many Myanmar national curriculum contents are not appropriate for the Zomi context.
• Instead of content-based learning, ZEWG representatives think to teach competency-based knowledge and skills which could be critical for both their further learning opportunities and also their livelihoods in the current political crisis.
• Due to security reason, physical classes are challenging to organize, but internet-based teachings are expensive. Most Zomi households do not have proper electricity and electronic devices for long hours of online teaching. Therefore, teaching hours need to be shortened.
• For many reasons, including , there are often teachers shortage. ZEWG thus decide to combine grades into six levels.

The designed teaching hours, curriculum, and grade combinations are as follow:

ZEWG curriculum development is led by Tg. Suan Kap, and there are 23 voluntary team members. Thanks to our volunteers, and also to Dr. Thein Lwin for his knowledge sharing to the team members.

There are still many challenges in both the curriculum development process and other ZEWG’s works. First of all, most of the team members are not experts in curriculum development. Second, although ZEWG wants to use Zomi language in the curriculum development, there are many challenges such as terminologies and limited contents for the curriculum which are already in Zomi language. Third, due to lack of proper finance and since members are volunteers, ZEWG could not force teams to deliver works as promised. The curriculum needs to revise and strengthen for Zomi context-wide teaching and for the long-run Zomi education system, not just for emergency teaching during this political crisis.