December 1, 2010
Our Saturday trip to the refugee camps began with a visit to a middle school near Merapi, where several children from refugee camps were attending classes. Ibu Maria had arranged two workshops with teachers from the area, one for math teachers and one for English teachers. I’d gladly agreed to do it – though I think I had been confirmed before I found out about it – because I have been wanting to meet and talk about teaching in Indonesia with some practicing teachers, and Ibu Maria wanted to know if I had handouts or a Power Point presentation for my teachers (I am convinced that Power Point has colonized global ways of knowledge, but that’s for a different posting). I told her I wasn’t going to prepare anything, because I didn’t know anything about teaching in Indonesia and I had to meet the teachers first before I knew what I would say to them. I’m never sure if this is actually just laziness on my part, or some sort of wise behavior, but I do know that if I had prepared some sort of activity – Language Games! – I would have blown my learning opportunity.
We met first in a large room, where there was a small ceremony. “ It’s culture,” Ibu Maria said. (Ibu Maria says “it’s culture” about everything, usually involving some nice thing that she or her husband are doing for our family and which we are unable to stop them from doing even with our extensive protestations.) “It’s culture” to have a little ritual before we start the workshop, and all the dignitaries in the room had to say a little something. I didn’t understand everything, but Ibu Maria warned me (though only just as the ceremony was beginning) that I would have to speak too, and that she would translate for me. I said a few things, including what I reported on in the last entry, and about how excited I was to meet teachers, etc. etc. I must have been a little flustered, though, because when I was finished one of the people asked me what my name was.
After the ceremony, I went with the five middle school English teachers, joined later by a sixth, to a classroom in the middle school. We arranged the desks in a small circle, and I told them candidly that I had nothing prepared, that I didn’t know enough about them to know what to say, and that I hoped they didn’t mind if we just had a conversation. They didn’t say that they did, but I suspect a little that they did mind, in fact, because I think they were expecting some kind of wisdom about teaching from me.
They introduced themselves one by one.
C, the first teacher, had been teaching for five years, and one of the first things he said was: “I think sometimes that teaching the English language is a useless activity.” His problem, it turned out, was not that teaching was a waste of time, but that the government of Indonesia required all teachers, in all schools, to teach the same material at the same level as a way of preparing students to take the same test at the end of the year. If they failed that test, they had a second chance, and if they failed that second test, they had to repeat the class. It was, I quickly learned, a multiple choice test. (Note my earlier complaint in an earlier entry that I had to teach a common examination with five other classes in my department, and that I found – find – it stifling to my ability to teach the students in my class.) Failure on that test by the students is, of course, failure by the teachers. This is a global narrative for teachers, told in a particularly stark way here.
Bear in mind that Indonesia has 17,000 islands, though only 922 of them are permanently occupied. There are more than 700 languages actually spoken on the archipelago, Indonesian being the official language of the country but the second language of almost all Indonesians. There is a staggering and very visible class divide here, the gap between wealthy and poor something difficult to describe, even from an American perspective. The 2000 census of Indonesia lists 206 million people. And every single Indonesian eighth-grader on all of these islands speaking all of these languages from all of these backgrounds learns the same curriculum in preparation for the same test. It makes the deep concerns I have about official standards for teachers in the United States appear paltry, by comparison.
The second teacher, his partner, has been teaching for six months. I asked her what surprised her the most about her job since she started teaching. “It’s really hard,” she said. “I didn’t realize how hard it was to work with so many students.” Another teacher, an older man who had been teaching for 24 years, said that he though he had to teach things that students weren’t learning from. A young man who had been teaching for three years fretted about the motivation of his students. “I thought they would like to play games,” he said, “but they do not.” And all of them expressed clear frustrations with the government curriculum.
I have not yet seen the curriculum, though I have one on its way from Ibu Maria. It includes, as it was described to me by these teachers, narrative, descriptive, and procedural texts. It emphasizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking (but the test that measures all this is multiple choice and scored anonymously). The teachers described similar problems as they went around the room: students don’t care about the readings, students aren’t excited by the language, teachers have to teach materials they don’t think help students actually learn the language, they have to teach so that students will pass a multiple test even though the curriculum states other priorities. And they all had 40-47 students per class.
I wanted to know, as we spoke, how they handled this, focusing on things they did, that worked, even though they weren’t in the curriculum, and then goals that were in the curriculum which they could agree with. About the first, the most common response was finding new texts. “My students don’t want to read Javanese legends,” one person told me. “They’re bored by them.” So he finds fairy tales, which they like better, unfamiliar stories. They go outside; they have a dance with songs in English; and so forth.
About the goals in the curriculum that they could agree with, I got an immediate and angry response from C. “You shouldn’t ask us to agree with anything the government wants us to do. They have done nothing for the people in Merapi. They are doing nothing. We will not find anything they ask us to do worth doing.”
It was an amazing 90 minutes with those teachers. I have no idea if I offered them anything, though I can say that they taught me a great deal, and I am hoping they will follow through on the invitations they promised me to visit their classes; I want to speak to them again. We talked about what they did as teachers to subvert the curriculum, and how to think about teaching with that in mind. I told them that I had a version of this conversation with teachers I worked with in the United States, who face similar pressures from official standard setters who seem to target most of all the professional knowledge that teachers bring to the classroom. After that we took pictures for several minutes, part of the after-ceremony, I think, in situations like this.
Because of my academic field, I have been aware for some time of the research and scholarship that deal with English as global language, but my interest has been, I must say, rather secondary – I have kept vaguely up with the writing out of a kind of professional responsibility. But now I am a teacher of English to groups of Indonesians and living in a country and part of the world where English instruction is omnipresent; signs hang outside houses all over Salatiga, offering English classes. I am part of the project of global English, in a direct way, and to be in that position is to force countless questions about the politics of the project, ones I know I will write more about because they are becoming one of the primary issues I am thinking about. Talking to these teachers put the issue squarely inside the rural classrooms of Central Java, where the global force of English as a world language is felt by resistant and already multilingual students and their frustrated teachers. Who drives this learning? Who decides to what ends it is used? Who decides what are the “best” methods (the phrase I hate the most to describe teaching: “best practices”)? And what place do teachers have in any of this? It’s mind-spinning and in the vortex of national aspirations and global economics and the ambitions of people everywhere to speak so they will be heard, in some way. Pak Kirk: Global English Teacher. A life of adventure and antonyms.
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