Collaborating with Tibetan Schools in Exile

Since the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959, many Tibetan people have followed him to India where they have established an education system to preserve the Tibetan culture and community. Central to this mission is the Tibetan Children’s Village (TCV), a thriving, integrated educational community for Tibetan children in exile currently serving more than 16,000 children in schools from Ladakh in the North to Bylakuppe in the South of India.

TCV includes the Dalai Lama Institute for Higher Education (DLIHE), which runs college programs for Tibetans. TCV seeks to “endeavor further to improve the quality of our children’s education and their cultural and social upbringing without necessarily sacrificing the simplicity of our exile life-style.” Aligned with this mission, the Center for Youth Engagement in the UMass College of Education developed a collaborative partnership with the TCV and Christ University in Bengaluru to improve support and services for students with specialized learning and behavioral needs.

For the past 25 years, the UMass College of Education has had a relationship with the Tibetan community, supporting and training Tibetan educators, especially in the graduate programs in special education and school counseling. These students were Fulbright scholars partially funded by the Tibet Fund. Through these experiences, Director of the Center for Youth Engagement Dr. Michael Krezmien and Professor Emeritus of school counseling Dr. Jay Carey developed relationships with the students, which they maintained after students returned to teach in the TCV schools. While these fellowships were extremely important, the model wasn’t particularly effective in supporting systematic change in the Tibetan schools.

As Carey explains, “The message that we consistently got was that they really appreciated their education, but the systems were so contextually different that they were only able to really apply a small percentage of what they learned.” It became apparent that a training program was needed in the TCV schools to support the educators who were currently teaching and counseling students. Of primary importance were the needs of students with specialized learning and behavioral needs. Carey and Krezmien endeavored to find a way to implement such a program.

The first step was to build a collaborative partnership capable of supporting a long-term program. Thondup Tsering was key to the development of this partnership. Tsering was one of the first Tibetans to come to the College of Education school counseling program on a Fulbright. A residence director in UMass Housing, Tsering is an important member of the Tibetan community and established a connection with leaders from the TCV and the DLIHE, including B Tsering, the principal of the Institute and Thondup Tsering’s former teacher. Tsering was instrumental in establishing a formal partnership with the Center for Youth Engagement and in supporting the development of the initial training program.

The collaboration also includes partners from Christ University, led by Dr. Tony Sam George, who will play a vital role in implementing an ongoing evaluation system for the training program. This partnership has expanded Chancellor Kumble R. Subbaswamy’s initiative to promote collaborations with universities in India. The team was able to pool resources from the UMass Chancellor, the International Programs Office, The Vice Chancellor for Research and Engagement, the Center for Youth Engagement, and the College of Education to support the work over the first year.

This partnership has led to the development of the first series of trainings developed and implemented by Center for Youth Engagement fellows. The team includes two doctoral students, Megan Grant (educational leadership) and Lisa Amato (special education) and three faculty, Krezmien, Carey, and Associate Director of the Center for Youth Engagement Dr. Sarah Fefer. As a first step, Grant and Carey conducted an evaluation visit to the DLIHE and to a number of TCV schools in November of 2018 to get a lay of the land with regards to the needs of students with learning and behavioral differences.

According to Carey, the trip allowed the team to “confirm to our satisfaction that it is indeed a problem and understand it in a way that we could actually work with them to formulate some steps to make reasonable progress around providing a better education.” The team found that there was a need for additional training and support within the areas of learning and behavioral differences.

Back at UMass, Grant, Amato, and Krezmien dedicated the next two months to designing and developing an intensive three-day training on Learning and Behavioral Differences to establish a shared understanding of the needs of students with learning and behavioral differences, and to develop an initial sense of how to identify and classify specific learning and behavioral differences. This training will serve as a foundation for future trainings with a focus on the development of specific intervention strategies to support students with learning and behavioral needs.

In creating the training, the team was very cognizant of their responsibility to complement what already exists in the Tibetan schools without altering or interfering with the Tibetan culture. In order to make change, the team understood that the training needed to align with the Tibetan culture and educational framework. One of the key differences between the U.S. and Tibetan educational systems is the nature of community in schools. The Tibetan schools have a very communal culture and educators are dedicated to the service of that community. This is fundamental to who the Tibetan people are. 

Grant explains, “Even if we might be community-based people; our system, we have to recognize, is developed from a very individualistic perspective.” To that end, they designed the training to augment the effective models already in place in the system, not to implement a Westernized program in place of the current education models. They accomplished this in part through a collaborative development process that included a Tibetan educator in all aspects of the curriculum development, including the development of Tibetan translations for all trainings and materials.

Grant and Amato returned to India for the first two weeks of March 2019 to implement the training. They began with introductions into learning and behavior differences, including activities that simulated the experiences of students who struggle with learning or behaviors in the classroom. “We had some activities that really demonstrate what it feels like if you have trouble with comprehension or decoding,” says Grant. “I think it was very helpful for them to actually see what it feels like to be called out on the spot and not be able to perform.” On the second day of training, Amato and Grant introduced concepts of behaviorism and applied behavior analysis. They also provided an introduction"to how experiencing trauma can affect a student's behavior, which is a difficult concept for educators to understand.

As Grant explains, it is challenging for Tibetans to understand trauma the way that we do in the U.S.—that in order to address issues of trauma, it is critical to acknowledge and process it. “That really is counter in a lot of ways to the Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, which is that suffering is part of life and that, if you’re dedicating too much of your mind space to focusing on that, then you’re not leaving enough empty space for your spiritual practice,” Grant explains. The training sought to help the educators see that trauma can cause children to behave in certain ways, and when educators understand the root of the behavior, they can address it without judgment.

Although our approach to trauma and behavior may be difficult for Tibetans to grasp, as a community, they are well position to understand the concept of compassion rather than judgment. “The idea of responsibility to the community and group compassion is something that comes naturally to them,” observes Grant. To capitalize on this, the training team grounded the content of the training in approaches that embrace compassion. For example, one of the experts on the team discussed how the provision of extra services to a child is not favoritism, but instead models how to show compassion. Other students in a class can observe the teacher implement an individualized intervention for students with specialized needs and understand that is a compassionate way to support their peers with specialized needs. “Once we said that,” notes Grant, “it was immediately like ‘yes, that’s exactly how we are, that’s what the Dalai Lama says we should do.’”

 The idea of responsibility to the community and group compassion is something that comes naturally to them.

 

Megan Grant

Grant sees an important part of the UMass team’s job as facilitating more collaboration between the schools, so they can share their own best practices among themselves. “A lot of the things that were happening in one school that nobody else knew about were the types of things that we would recommend they start. Harnessing that as much as possible alleviates the issue with the cultural translation. If it’s already happening in one school, it can be translated to a different school.”

For example, one of the TCV schools, Bylakuppe, in South India, adopted an intensive 21-day mediation program. Teachers identify a student who’s having significant issues, and over the course of 21 days, that student meets with headmasters, teachers, monks, and nurses. “So they'll be getting different perspectives from different pockets of the school,” Grant explains, and they “nurture and shower this person with attention at the same time, letting them get exposed to the health perspective, the spiritual perspective, the educational perspective.”

The team was struck by what an excellent job the Tibetan schools are doing already. This is in part because they are residential schools and the faculty and staff spend extensive time with the students outside of the classroom, getting know them thoroughly, and devoting extra time if need be. Grant also notes that this school has an excellent protocol for communicating positive information with parents, which counteracts the tendencies in educational settings to only communicate with the parents when something is going wrong. Fefer was impressed that the school developed interventions that are in line with evidence-based practice, similar to “a full wrap around model in the 21-day intensive or with the positive parent contact. That's what I’m researching right now in U.S. schools,” she adds.

The training also included a “Meet the Experts” video conference with Dr. Jason Travers, an associate professor from Kansas University, Dr. Ian Barron, director of the Center for International Education, and Krezmien, experts in the areas of reading, behavior, and trauma. The two-hour call allowed the participants to ask specific questions about the material covered in the training, and to get feedback from experts with practical and research experience on those topics.

This was a critical element to the training because it demonstrated the capacity to provide in-depth content virtually, a cost-effective approach to training that the team envisions using in the future. Carey and Krezmien envision a program that involves a mix of in-person training, online courses, and intensive in-school trainings. The schools can then share their developing knowledge in online learning communities facilitated by the Center for Youth Engagement and UMass faculty and doctoral candidates.

Now that Grant and Amato have completed their trainings in India, the team is planning the next steps, including webinars of the existing trainings in both English and Tibetan. They are working with Tenzin Namgyal, the IT director for the DLIHE, to identify an appropriate online learning system such as Google classroom to host the trainings. They are planning the next set of trainings in the TCV schools to help develop and implement a model for addressing behavior and learning differences. Finally, they are looking into ways to develop an educational certificate program in special education and school counseling to develop long-term capacity to support students with learning and behavioral differences in the TCV schools.

The partnership between the Center for Youth Engagement, the TCV, the DLIHE, and Christ University demonstrates the impact that a committed group of dedicated people can have on the educational needs of struggling learners. To date, the team has donated their time to this work, only using funds to cover travel. They hope that the accomplishments made during this first year will lead to new sources of funding that can increase the scope of the work­. The dedication certainly comes from their passion for ensuring all children have access to education, but with this community, it goes a little deeper. 

 The second you become immersed at all in this community, you become really committed to the cause of the Tibetan people. I think it’s impossible to work with them without being cognizant of that.

 

Megan Grant