Anyone interested in human rights, education and/or languages may be interested in a talk being given in the Perry Presentation Room at Champlain College at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, February 20th, featuring guest speaker Maung Nyeu.
Maung is an ethnic Marma from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, the first of his people ever to attend school in the United States, and not just any school: he is completing is PhD at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
He has not only managed to survive the genocide and ethnic cleansing being systematically carried out in his region but has created three schools where indigenous children are now educated beginning in their mother tongues, a spectacular and life-saving initiative. (His visit to Burlington is timed to coincide with International Mother Language Day, a crucial event in the calendar for indigenous and minority folks.) Maung and his team (ourgoldenhour.org and endangeredalphabets.com) have created and published groundbreaking classroom materials in the endangered languages and alphabets of the region. These books, some of which feature folk tales from the region retold by schoolchildren and published as classroom readers, have won several publishing awards even in the United States.
Maung is an astonishing and inspiring speaker, articulate, modest and remarkably cheerful given what has happened and what continues to happen to minorities in the Hill Tracts, including his own family.
Admission is free. All are welcome. This event is co-sponsored by the Core Division and the Publishing in the 21st Century class at Champlain College.
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