An educational legacy: Exploring the links between education and resilience at the ECCC

About half a million Cambodians have attended hearings or outreach activities about the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) since public hearings began in 2009. Countless more have watched the trials unfold on television, and increasingly on social media. To date, the majority of conversations around the legacy of the ECCC have come from international scholars focusing on the legal impact the trials may have. This article instead presents the often-missing views of Cambodian youth about the Tribunal. It also, more broadly, explores the ECCC’s impact on education and young people’s understanding of history. Based on research carried out with university students, this article argues that the contribution of the ECCC to education has often been overlooked and is in fact one of its most significant legacies. In Cambodia, government and non-government organizations, as well as academic institutions, have the unique opportunity to incorporate testimony, footage, and documents from the ECCC into their programmes, greatly adding to the existing repertoire of Khmer-language resources dealing with the past. The result is a more well-rounded programme of transitional justice and reconciliation than the court alone could have provided, and certainly a higher level of external resilience than would have occurred had the court been located outside of Cambodia.

Cambodian Youth Perspectives on Social and Educational Barriers

This case study examines these barriers using a questionnaire assessing the youth’s attitudes toward education (n = 50). Results indicated that poverty and the pressure to migrate for work remain significant barriers to educational attainment, despite the perceived benefits of education by youth and encouragement by families. Results revealed that inter-educational issues occur despite unclear prevalence, including negative pressures, physical and verbal abuse of students by teachers, teachers charging students fees, and government schools being comparatively less safe and encouraging than home and a local NGO school. These findings can be used to better tailor development aid targeting educational measures, particularly encouraging a shift from convincing rural Cambodians to value education to targeting the contextual barriers that exist.

Identity Options and Cultural Representations in English Textbooks Used in Cambodia

Language textbooks play an important role in bridging learners’ understanding between the source culture and target culture. This study explores how the Cambodian and foreign characters are produced and how the source and target cultures are represented in three English language textbooks published by the Cambodian Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MoEYS). The data were collected from textbook passages, exercises and images presented in the textbooks and the data were analyzed based on the emerging themes in language and cultural representations of the textbooks. The findings indicate that regarding the distribution in the target communities, Anglophone and their postcolonial countries are prominently highlighted in the textbooks with the exception that Japan is exclusively introduced as imagined interlocutor for cultural communication; concerning the representation of the source culture, Buddhism and Khmer are constructed as legitimate forms of Cambodian practices. Based on the findings, we argue that English textbooks produced in Cambodia have not provided Cambodian youth with balanced exposure of cultural diversity. The study has implications for designing English textbooks with the consideration of diverse identity options and cultural representations.