Signing off, for now, and thanks if you've been reading

            I am home now, almost a week, and already the trip recedes in my mind like a vivid dream I can’t hold on to the minute after I wake up. It’s familiar, that receding, just like the last time, and this time with a similar, if less pronounced, sense of displacement happening along with it. Funny to return to the house where I’ve been absent the last month, to routines that have shifted without my presence; this time I tried to fold myself back in the place immediately, and it wasn’t so easy. But we’re getting our feet again, all of us, by this point.

            On the second to last morning, breakfast in a Salatiga hotel where I stayed with the participants from the Asia Creative Writing Group for two nights after our return from Dieng, I had a conversation with a Burmese woman who has been a lecturer in education in New Zealand for 10 years. She is an ethnographer who studies English language teaching in several countries – most recently she worked in Nepal, and she has also worked in Burma. She observes classrooms, and interviews teachers and students, the work of ethnography, for extended periods of time, and she said that teachers always ask her how they could be better teachers, what they might do better. “I never answer that question,” she told me. “That’s not why I am there.” Instead, she said, she always learns a new technique, new ideas, that challenge her notions about teaching.

            In Burma, for example, she noticed that recent graduates, who had been given work in Japan on the condition that they could learn Japanese in a year before they went, were actually becoming nearly fluent in Japanese in that time, and she wondered how they could do it, when they’d been learning English every year in school and could still not speak it that well. She said that their education would start with a man from Japan coming, speaking to the students about whatever he wanted to in Japanese, and then their Burmese teacher would translate everything he had said, and that they would do this, every day, for about month. They didn’t understand anything at first, she said. When the Japanese speaker left, they would start learning some of the basics of Japanese – vocabulary, grammar, etc. – for about month, and then the Japanese man would return for a month and they’d do the same thing. By the end of a year, they didn’t need translation anymore. It happened that quickly, and it was a method that was, she said, completely new to her as an educational method.

            The conversation troubled me, on my last full day in Salatiga, worried me, because I have wondered as I have moved around here what it is I think I am doing, what sort of impact I hope these workshops will have. I’ve had this niggling feeling that I am doing exactly what she said she doesn’t do – coming into an educational context and telling them how to change their practice so that they do it better. I think that’s probably too simplistic, but I also think that it might not be. I’m wrestling with this as I return, in part because I find this work so exciting and engaging – exciting and engaging enough to be motivated to create for myself the reasons that I am being successful, that is worth doing again. And of course narrating the conditions of our pedagogical success, in any context, becomes a sort of necessary professional habit for a teacher; that is, to sustain ourselves in this work, we have to tell ourselves stories about why it’s working.

            On one level, getting teachers to write and then reflect on the act of writing – in any context – has always seemed to me like a powerful teaching tool, a way to reimagine what writers experience. Certainly, when English language teachers in non-English speaking countries do this, they worry about many of the things that their students worry about, and they make mistakes too, if that word has any meaning in the writing world I’m trying to encourage. It’s also the case that teachers in the United States agonize, although in a different way, about student error in writing. So I’m torn about my role, about my ideas, about the value of the work beyond the extraordinary opportunities for learning and engagement it has offered me. That has been invaluable, but as I noted, perhaps in ways that can distract me from asking the right questions.

            I suppose that I am still struck, even more so, by the conditions of life on the ground for the people who are most caught in the middle of English as a global lingua franca, the teachers in the expanding circle countries, places like Indonesia where the ideas of English – whatever those ideas are – take on a kind of energy familiar to me as a student of the idea of literacy in educational circles: students need English to get good jobs, to survive in the world, to support the national economies in an era of globalization – those are the grand narratives that aren’t always articulated but are always present, and how teachers experience those grand narratives at the local level is at once both mystifying and important to me, somehow. In some ways, as they have with literacy in the United States, narratives like that induce fear into teachers and students who understand that their difficulty with things like grammatical structure and accents and vocabulary are not just personal learning challenges but are representatives of a sliding scale of failure that starts with teachers being assessed as poor teachers and moves through schools and systems and finally the nation itself failing to meet the expectations of a global economy. All of that, it seems to me, shows up in a sentence like “Umi angry I.”

            I hope, certainly, that I will continue to do this work in one way or another. But I need that internal critic to always ask me why I am doing it, the way I asked myself why I was teaching in the jail when I taught there: what good did I think it did? Who was I doing it for – myself or my students? What possible future did I see this playing into? Those will never be one-dimensional questions or answers.

            We’re excited about translingualism in my academic field, writing about how to embrace the multiplicity of languages showing up in our writing classrooms, and how those languages challenge our easily held ideas about writing and language and correctness and globalization. Good. But sometimes the place I work from – the American university – has difficulty following through with its own important insights in settings beyond the American university. So it matters that I sat with 15 English language teachers last month in an Islamic boarding school on the eastern tip of Madura Island – teachers who spoke at least three languages and usually four or five – and listened to them describe their challenges and frustrations and successes teaching English.

            On my last day in Salatiga - my ride for the airport came at 2:30, so I had several hours – my former student Galih met me at the University on his motorbike, and I spent the day with him and later with his fiancée, Kharisma, another former student. He shifted from his ambition of getting a masters in American literature in his last year in college when he and Kharisma opened up an English language school with the idea of supporting English language learning in the kampungs outside Salatiga, the rural and often desperately poor villages much like the ones he had been raised in. And he spoke about that education not only in terms of teaching English, but in helping students ask vital questions about the future of their country, questions about the environment and corruption and democracy – he was beginning to articulate a “why” behind his program that transcended the national educational narratives about why English mattered, and their school funds those free programs through paid-for programs within Salatiga. Talking to him made me think about my own stumbling and exciting first experiences in the literacy center in Seattle, where I had to puzzle through so many cultural associations and political agendas in the company of groups of deep thinkers that included my students and colleagues, who always challenged me and made me doubt everything I thought I knew. He’s wrapped up in those narratives about global English, competing with other organizations in Salatiga that are teaching English, competing within himself for language about why the teaching he is doing matters beyond the always unsatisfying answers we get boxed and bullet-pointed in official documents, and that amount to: “it matters because we said it matters.” These teachers are the ones I want to watch, and for purposes I can’t yet articulate. And they are the ones who still make me doubt everything I think I am doing, challenge me to think through my own motives, wonder what the point of any of this is.

            Galih told me that every time he meets with his language students, he starts by having them write about something that matters to them, a prompt he gives them that gets them to share their ideas in a more comfortable way than it would happen from asking them to speak it. He got that idea from my critical reading class in 2010, he told me, when he was a fourth semester student who noticed that his classmates said things, revealed things, and thought more openly, because I asked them to write at the beginning of every class, because I asked them what they thought and then listened to it. It was important to sit with him and hear that – important to think that there might be answers to my questions about my work that end in ripples like that instead of end only in more stamps in my passport.  He is dreaming the dream about education that all the teachers I respect the most keep dreaming, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, in the face of systems that continually narrow our goals in the most pedestrian and tedious sets of economic outcomes and objectives – he is dreaming of education that makes the world a better place rather than simply serves the systems we are all a part of anyway. That dream is always fraught too, always caught up in its own contradictions and self-propelling narratives – we want so badly to be transformative, we teachers, that we can’t talk about our teaching without including some Galih story or another – but still, it’s the dream we need to keep dreaming anyway, a dream we need to help teachers foster and embrace in their own practice.

            This will, for the moment, wrap up this blog. If you’ve been reading it, I hope you’ll let me know in one way or another. The belief in readers has made this something other than a diary entry or a travel journal. So I am grateful for you out there, even the idea of you out there. And I’m thankful for this space of written reflection. And I am glad to be home – even when Graham angrily reminds me, after I tell him that no, he can’t have a bowl of ice cream right after school, that things have changed around here in the month that I’ve been gone (or in the time that “you ditched us,” as he said in another context – our kids know just where to pour that salt). I’m glad I went. And now I’ve got to turn my head back to the other work – the history of the literacy test as a voting qualification in the United States – that I’ve completely dropped in my Indonesian month. Sometime in the future this blog will pop up again, though. I hope I’ll have readers – pretend or better yet actually – then too. Thanks.

Satya Wacana and the Writing Workshop

            The two-day conference this week – I had a plenary on Wednesday, and spoke about the zeal to correct error and the fear of writing (on the part of both teachers and students) – was attended primarily by students in the Language and Literature department of Satya Wacana – the English Department and my old home here. I had forgotten how charming the students here are, how open and enthusiastic and funny and, really, the best word is sweet. I generally like my students anywhere I meet them, and I certainly like my students in Montana – the difference here is that students aren’t so weighed down by self-consciousness and irony, perhaps. They have annual competitions between classes from year-to-year that are a two day festival of games – physical and mental – performances, parties, and students get so excited. I probably had 150 pictures of me taken during the conference by students lined up to get in on the act, and they were inexplicably excited and smiling. When I sat next to a student in one of the smaller conference sessions (short report: PowerPoint is still a problem here), they would get super giggly and turn away from me, which always made me laugh. But they always wanted to talk, loved when I spoke Indonesian, and were polite and funny and curious. They are like I remember them. They support each other when they take risks (like reading their brand new writing in English in front of a large group that includes 2 of the 3 plenary speakers) by cheering and hooting and laughing and clapping, and they are fun, especially.

I had forgotten that every day, in the tiny little courtyard outside my old building, students are gathered in groups with guitars and drums and sometimes a violin or two, playing music, singing.  And the students in the English department all speak at least three languages (including English) and most of them more – they come from all over Indonesia, and the ones who come from outside Java master Javanese in about six months to a year, they tell me – they know how to learn languages. They have all sorts of the same student characteristics as my students in the United States too, of course – don’t want to over-romanticize them. They procrastinate, some don’t care and don’t do any of the work, etc. etc. But they are so much fun to be around, with a contagious energy that I has been a pleasure to remember.

Okay – I am writing this from a tea plantation on the Dieng Plateau this morning, with the Asian Creative Writing Group that I have been invited to join (my third meeting with them). This group has two Indonesians, a woman from Myanmar, two Nepalis, a Vietnamese woman, a Brazilian, a Malaysian, a Brit (Alan Maley, a pretty prominent TESOL guy) and me – plus we’re joined by several folks from Satya Wacana, so it’s a wonderful international group. We had a poetry reading last night on the porch, and it was fun.  Some wonderful writers here, and the project of including creative writing in English language teaching seems to be taking off.

Everyone is coming to eat where I am writing, and I am hungry. Up to the ruins this morning. Bye.

Blog lull

I am in a lull now because I am writing my talk for Wednesday morning - I scrapped what I was going to say because of thinking I did during the workshops here, which means I am writing an entirely new paper. This causes swings of desperation from moment to moment as I think of all the food in Salatiga that is going uneaten by me as I sit inside typing frantically, but so it will be. I have had time to pop up at my former pembantu's house (translates directly into "helper," though as Laura always said, she really should have been called a "doer," since she did everything for us). It was hilarious and wonderful - she and her family became very good friends, very quickly, and so it was a joyful reunion, and though I had little time that first evening, I went back last night for dinner, and she cooked the most wonderful meal, like she used to cook for us before. (Readers of this blog might remember my early agonizing about having a maid at all when we moved here - we learned, correctly I think, that we would not have appeared as maverick and independent people who could take care of ourselves - which I am not sure would have been true anyway, immediately upon arrival - but rather that we would have appeared as wealthy people who were too cheap to provide a job or two for the local economy, misers and hoarders.)  That was wonderful. My lessons in Indonesian continued over dinner, and I'll go back at least one more time before I leave.

 There will be more here soon, I hope, but after I write my talk I have to write all the pieces that I am supposed to bring to the three day writing workshop that starts on Thursday, and that I haven't even thought about yet. So expect a delay.

Some pictures

Would that these were in some particular order, but I cannot spend my evening here in Salatiga trying to figure out how to arrange the photo on a very clumsy interface. So never mind. They are here, anyway.

Umi's family, on a walk we took up the little mountain that's right in their backyard, almost.

The lunch the teachers from the school around the corner from Umi brought me over to eat. It was really good. 

The school around the corner from Umi's house that she helped create as a volunteer project. That's one of the  6 banners with my name in it in East Java and Madura, future table cloths, all, except the one with the mosque on it that I am bringing home.

Ibu Umi's house, with a mango tree in the front yard that is only 17 years old. 

The salt farm in Madura.

Here's one of the Sulphur miners hauling down a load. They also try to sell you little turtles carved out of sulphur, which are pretty cool actually.

The crater at Kanah Ijen, where they mine sulphur. You can see the men down there, tiny, getting it out. They carry about  65-75 kilos at a time, about 1 kilometer up from the crater and 3 down. They make very good money by local standards, but it's absurdly difficult work, and outrageously unhealthy.

View of the boats, after all the action, from above, near where the monkey charged me. The giant monkey. The giant angry  monkey with super huge sharp teeth.

The catch from the night. The tiny white fish are used to make tirasi, the ubiquitous shrimp paste of Indonesia - one tesspoon would last me 10 years, but in minuscule amounts it's okay in sambal.

The boats up close - they are super colorful and highly decorated.

The ships returning early Saturday morning

Meka (in red) and Egypt, sleeping

This is the fisherman who I visited with in the night, after they came back the next morning. He taught me the word for "fisherman" in Indonesian: "nalayan."

Pak Alvian (Al) and Ibu Umi, on their front porch

Bu Umi at the radio studio before our interview on Radio Republica Indonesia

Ibu Umi and the badang merah

Another transport day today, from Jember flying to Surabaya, and from Surabaya to Semarang – and then a taxi up the mountain to Salatiga, and back to Colin and Retno’s house. Which means I had to say goodbye this morning to Egypt and Meka, Umi’s two sons, and to Pak Alvian, Umi’s husband. I said goodbye to Umi too, though I will see her again in Salatiga next week. But I am sad and full of joy at the same time.

I met Umi the first time in March of 2011, when I was invited to attend the Asian English Language Teachers Creative Writing Conference. I’d heard about it the first time when one of the founders – and now one of my friends, an English professor from Malaysia – spoke about it at a conference in Salatiga.  He said that it was based on the idea that teachers of writing in English should be writers too, and that teachers are able to better create their own materials for their students than any textbook could create – especially the readings. The heart of the Conference is a three day workshop, which I did in Jember in 2011, in Birgunj, Nepal, in 2013, and now, next week, in Salatiga, where teachers come together, share and critique writing, and as a final product publish a book of the participants’ writing that they did in the workshop. Anyone who knows about my work with teachers in the Yellowstone Writing Project will understand why I was immediately struck by this, and why I quickly introduced myself to Jaya, the English professor from Malaysia – he invited me to the conference in Jember that year, which might have been the best thing that happened to me, professionally, during a very rich year for me professionally in Indonesia (and personally, even more so, of course).

Umi Safari was one of the participants in the workshop. We sat next to each other around the table on that first day, and as often happens when I open my mouth here, she was surprised and delighted when I spoke some version of Bahasa Indonesia. She is so friendly and warm, as some of the people who (might) read this blog already know from meeting her in Montana, that it is impossible not to like her immediately. She resonates a kind of joy in the world, and she embraces people full-heartedly. We spoke so much about teaching that week, during and especially outside of the workshop, over dinners, in the bus on the way to the beach (the same beach I spent an overnight at last week), between sessions. I saw her as a kindred spirit then too, especially regarding her attitude toward teaching. She understood the official government curriculum as a distraction from the real work she needed to do as a teacher, she spoke about her students with love and respect and she based her ideas about teaching in that love and respect as a starting point.

Especially, I learned so much from her. Teachers in Indonesia, at all levels and in almost all places I have been, work in even more challenging conditions than teachers I know in the United States. In particular, they just have more and bigger classes, and the government curriculum is measured by national tests that all students, across the 3,000 mile archipelago with over 700 local languages spoken on over 1,000 inhabited islands, take at the same time.  Teachers feel enormous pressure to teach to the test, and in fact the government curriculum is incredibly rigid. Our first conversations were about that: how does she teach creatively and effectively in that situation? How does she negotiate between the approaches she knows work with her students and the blanket and undiscriminating approach of the government curriculum? She was wonderful, and she was applying for a Fulbright, and she asked me if I would read her application and give her feedback.

I did read it, and I don’t remember what suggestions I offered back, though I think it had something to do with making it more personal, with being more specific about how she thought it would help her teach better when she returned to Indonesia. And she got the Fulbright, a six-month stay the following year at Kent State, and while she was there, she came and stayed with us in Bozeman. Eighteen months later, she was chosen as one of the two to return to America to teach new participants about their experiences, and she came back to the United States. My family loved her immediately, like I did. Seamus came with me when I picked her up the first time, and she rushed into the terminal and gave him a big hug and stood with her arm around him and said, “Look at me Kirk, can you believe I am in Bozeman? I am in your home!” beaming as she squeezed him tightly.

Her visits turned into a grant she submitted, that we wrote together beginning during her second visit. I knew I was going to try to come to Salatiga for this workshop, and I expected it to be during my sabbatical semester, so we decided to extend my trip and try to get funding to support a series of workshops in East Java and Jember. We got the grant (in spite of, I should note, an epic screw-up of mine that nearly derailed the whole process and which I will say no more about here), and here I am today, in the waiting room of the new Jember airport, done with this part of the work.

Umi has been simply incredible. We have had such an extraordinarily good time together. We spent so much time laughing, and we made an especially strange couple, I know, as we walked around together in the time outside the workshop, especially in Sumenep on Madura, a place with very few bules (the closest translation for that is gringos) – I saw one other in over the four days we spent there. We would wander around the city at Umi’s very leisurely pace, her holding my arm or my hand, visiting and laughing, and I know people didn’t know what to make of us. Had Umi been younger, perhaps, people might have assumed that she was my “traveling companion,” which happens sometimes in Bali, but more rarely in Java, and I think never ever in Madura. Sumenep is a fairly devout Muslim city, though, and it was funny to see the reactions – more bemused and curious than anything else, I should emphasize – of people as we strolled around.

She was a fabulous collaborator in the workshops, too. Participants attended to what I am saying, it seems to me (if I remember of course to speak slowly and clearly), but I am an English professor from the United States, and know nothing about teaching in Indonesia. I know that a reaction to some of my ideas about teaching writing is a fully justified, “That’s nice, but he doesn’t know anything about what it’s like to teach here,” but Umi could always handle that, always entered the conversation to say, well, this is how I translate these ideas into my own classroom, this is how I think about them in the series of over-crowded rooms – over-crowded with students and curricular expectations. She made what we spoke about with teachers plausible, imaginable, in ways I would have had a harder time doing on my own. Of course in the process she taught me a lot.

In the ten days, we developed all sorts of inside jokes. We go hunting native speakers, I tell her I don’t want to pass away, she tells me I must have spilled water on my shirt. She is a woman who loves to laugh, and her open heart and generous wisdom sometimes is easy to pass off as something simple, but it isn’t. At her school, I think she scares the men who run the show there (I know this never happens in the United States, so some of the women reading this blog might be interested to learn of this unusual phenomenon). She is smart. She has had a Fulbright, and travelled to the United States twice on the dime of the U.S. government. Her students love love love her – the rooms and faces light up when she walks by – and she loves them. (At least about her, and I imagine her students, I don’t mean that euphemistically: she loves them.) She teaches with unorthodox methods, and mostly ignores the mandates of the government curriculum, and her students do well on the annual tests anyway, well enough that her principal doesn’t bother her about her teaching style anymore.

But after I had landed in Jakarta, her principal cancelled the workshop she’d spent three months planning, and that I’d travelled around the world to do. He narrowed in into a one day workshop with three different meetings. There was a three hour workshop with the English teachers from the school. “He’s the one who looks at porno in the office,” she told me about one of them later. “And he’s the other one.” One of the teachers said there are two kinds of students, the serious ones and the lazy, stupid ones. I told him I would never use those words to describe students because it would mean I couldn’t teach them anything. None of her colleagues showed up for the lunch she scheduled. She began crying in the teacher room, wondering why no one respected her. But it wasn’t true: she had scheduled a one hour meeting with the seniors from the school, a huge group who asked me questions about learning English, about motivation. I knew they had authoritarian teachers, in Banyuwangi I’d heard older teachers say about young women students – 21 or 22 -  that now was the time good Muslim girls needed to think about getting married and having children (to rolling eyes, I am happy to report). I told them when I closed that I hoped they remembered the simple but important truth that when real change in societies around the world occurred, it did so because young people stood up and said no. In Indonesia in 1998, young people stood up and said no more. In the United States too. In Hong Kong. And I made Umi translate for me. The students who asked the best questions, in the most interesting and complex English, were the girls from her class the previous year.

Her husband Alvian is an English teacher too, and an Imam at the mosque around the corner from their house. He and I talked at length about Islam, about fundamentalism. He has been preaching about Islam as a religion of tolerance and love, pushing against currents like ISIS, currents that exist in Indonesia too. Her children, especially the two I got to know, Meka and Egypt (he goes by Gipsy – the “g” in Indonesian is hard), are wonderful. Meka, ten, wouldn’t let me speak English, kept teaching me new Indonesian words and phrases. My four nights in their house in a Javanese neighborhood were one of the best Indonesian experiences I have had, and my capacity to speak Indonesian sky-rocketed. She has organized a school for students who drop out of high-school (where I spoke to students too) and an organization that does out-reach to young people to encourage them to read. “Not just book reading,” she explained in our radio interview yesterday. “We want them to learn to read situations, read the world around them.” She has never, by the way, read Paulo Freire. This is her, thinking about teaching, because she learned how do it by listening to her students, who she listens to because she loves them.

I left my iPhone in the place where we stayed in Banyuwangi – and only realized it after the four hour drive back to Jember. One of the volunteers in her organization drove on his motorbike, on the same day, to retrieve it. I paid for his gas and food, but Umi warned me not to offer him extra money. “If you give him money for it,” she said, “he’ll think you believe he did it for the money. He will be offended.” So I gave him a bunch of gifts instead and bought him lunch. She said that in Indonesia they call it the badang merah, the red thread, which the whole point of is never to cut. If I give him money, I am cutting the red thread. If I don’t, it continues to unravel, connecting more and more people through acts of generosity and kindness. Umi has red threads coming out of her from every direction. She unspooling miles and miles of the stuff. I can’t express enough my admiration and love for her.