Sanctity Of Multicultural Education In Teaching And Learning

The Joko “Jokowi” Widodo-Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama victory in the Jakarta gubernatorial election last year demonstrates that Indonesia’s democracy has progressed to a higher level.

 The rigid notion about how a particular group should lead the government has started fading. The tough “ethnicity” wall also appears to be crumbling.

 But is it true that intolerance has disappeared altogether? Or is the Jokowi-Ahok phenomenon just a superficially attractive delusion for what we call multicultural tolerance?

 Probably we should contemplate more on what has been happening. Some examples, like the inter-village clash in Maluku that claimed five lives just before New Year’s Eve and the warning by a particular group against Muslims wishing Christians a merry Christmas, do not follow the same path as our previous euphoria. Indeed, our multicultural tolerance still has a long way to go.

 Some aspects might cause intolerance. They might be personal experiences, parental issues, environmental or educational. The latter, especially formal education, plays a significant role in shaping the understanding of multiculturalism. Therefore, we should pay attention to the school element, particularly the teachers. Teachers must be able to prepare students as part of a multicultural society.

 Teachers hold a responsibility to create teaching and learning environments that promote a democratic exchange of ideas. By doing this, there will be strong multicultural education in our education system. According to Bannet et al, multicultural education is a democratic approach to teaching and learning that seeks to foster cultural pluralism within culturally diverse societies and an interdependent world. In the US, more than 63 percent of American universities require multicultural diversity in their core course for teachers’ education.

 Multicultural education focuses on students’ performance, both academically and socially. Nowadays, often as educators, teachers perceive teaching and learning as processes that solely concern the academic achievement of their students. In Indonesia, for example, most schools employ the results of academic tests as the primary measurement of being a “successful student”. This must change since it focuses more on cognition than preparing students to be responsible citizens of a multicultural world.

 Helping students to develop positive attitudes and become responsible individuals is extremely essential in a classroom. Teachers should encourage students to be active learners.

 To do this, teachers must lead students to know each other as individuals, regard each other as equals and be able to work together on common interests and goals in a safe and supportive classroom environment. Creating such a classroom climate that promotes the internalization of these shared values through multicultural education will help students actively develop as learners, as people and as citizens.

 Multicultural education will prepare students to be responsible members of society. Students must be aware that they are a part of society.

 As Pacino eloquently says, teaching and learning in the context of community is truly a moral, spiritual and ethical journey. The concept of ethical and moral values and actions in society should be integrated in their classroom.

 Hence, educators should acknowledge and address students’ need to carry on the real experience of being part of a community, not only of individual academic achievement at school.

 In addition, in multicultural and democratic countries, teachers should educate students how to actively participate and contribute to their society. By acquiring moral and ethical values from school, students will understand the dos and don’ts within a participatory democratic society. In order to achieve this, teachers should place themselves as the facilitators of information, not as dictators of information. This kind of active classroom setting enables students to experience the feelings of respect and self-autonomy.

 There are specific methods that teachers can implement to achieve multicultural education. One example is implementing activities and discussions that focus on the positive aspects of cultural identity, heritage and differences, such as involving students in developing personally relevant multicultural stories, books or even autobiographies. Teachers can ask students to actively present and discuss their own story.

 One of the purposes of inviting students to share their stories is to better understand how the students can use their background knowledge to gain access to curricular content. This will also include an understanding of cross-cultural differences and social challenges.

 Teachers can reinforce the importance of multicultural education by involving students in community service/learning activities. This gives students the opportunity to be more responsible, knowledgeable and sensitive to their own

 surroundings.

 This sensitivity is essential for the students’ personal moral development, their sense of community and increased tolerance, acceptance and respect for others.

 To realize multicultural education, a Herculean effort from all education stakeholders is mandatory. As Mahatma Gandhi once said, anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding. Hence, let’s keep up the spirit of multicultural tolerance in Indonesia once and for all.

Kunto Nurcahyoko ; 

The writer is pursuing a PhD degree

at the Ohio State University, in the US

JAKARTA POST,  05 Januari 2013

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Cross-curricular teaching is vital in primary education

Can science (IPA) and social studies (IPS) be merged and embedded into the core curriculum? Subject-oriented teachers, educators and pundits would insist that such integration is impossible. Nevertheless, this question has lingered around teaching professionals in the last three weeks.

 It is easy to forget that primary school teachers are class teachers. By profession, they are generalist educators, responsible for preparing children to be taught many subjects by secondary teachers later on in their education. Primary schools do not need subject specialists, because children’s learning does not fit into subject categories.

 As a matter of fact, what does happen in classrooms is complex. While content and target competencies can be standardized, it is not sensible to nationalize the styles and processes necessary to deliver the curriculum. Style is the teacher’s subjectivity factor, a unique art and is part of their personal competence.

 A distinctive characteristic of primary school education is cross-curricular teaching and learning. Being a generalist teacher is akin to being a cross-curricular teacher, moving from one topic to the next smoothly without causing cognitive distress on students.

 Considering their ages (6-12), what primary school students learn is not subjects as known in secondary schools and colleges, but rather topics or themes. Primary teachers should unlearn the conventional meaning attached to subjects. Instead, they should apply topics or themes, which are more friendly and palatable to primary school culture.

 The government seems adamant in excluding science and social studies from the core curriculum (religion, mathematics, Indonesian language and civics). However, it is grossly wrong to assume that primary students will be denied curiosity about and awareness of scientific and social phenomena.

 By comparison, in the United Kingdom, the core curriculum includes English, science and mathematics. After all, it does not mean that British primary students are not taught to be sensitive of social phenomena. The truth is that topics of social issues are integrated into the core curriculum.

 There must be ethical reasons for the Indonesian government to exclude them from its core curriculum. At primary school level, both science and social studies could be integrated and embedded to the core curriculum.

 What is pressing now is to define what constitutes the profession of primary teachers.

 There seems to be a need for intellectual conversion among teachers and policymakers regarding the function of primary education, particularly with regards to the imminent core curriculum.

 The current law on education breaks down teacher competence into four separate, yet interlocking, competencies; namely pedagogic competence, individual or personal competence, professional competence and social competence.

 By law, professional teachers are those who have those four competencies, including professional competence. Don’t you find something bizarre here, that professional teachers should have professional competence?

 The root of the problem goes back to the time when the bill drafters defined professional competence as parallel with the other three competencies. In other words, the word “professional” is a misnomer. It should, instead, be the umbrella competence subsuming all the four competencies.

 Reading world literature on teaching, you would find that professional competence is the super-ordinate, not a subordinate of the various competencies elaborated above.

 Granted, professional primary teachers are those who know how to teach all core subjects. Besides, they have cross-curricular competence to impart on students’ curiosity on various topics in science, history, geography, health, environment and so forth.

 Primary teachers are expected to be passionate about teaching children, master all the core subjects as well as the cross curricular topics and themes and in addition be able to communicate socially and professionally.

 Despite the so-called core curriculum, let’s stay away from content-led curriculum to a more productive curriculum by the following guiding principles. First, we should replace the thrust of content and objectives, with a concern for skills and processes. Naturally, primary students love play-based learning.

 Second, teachers should move from subjects and attainment to cross-curricular topics or themes and the affective domain. School environments are actually rich with unlimited topics and themes to explore. Newspapers, for example, report diverse day-to-day topics to deal with.

 Third, teachers should shift the emphasis from didactic teaching to self-directed learning. Students should be empowered to explore their curiosity about practically any topic and theme. In other words, we should think of the four core curriculum as the starting and central theme to explore other topics and themes.

 Fourth, to be good at cross-curriculum teaching, teachers must have the skills in class management, explaining, questioning, task setting and differentiation, as well as, increasingly, in assessment. Assessing a student’s mastery of subject matters is easier than mastering their understanding of cross-curricular topic.

 Let’s take baking as a teaching topic. Children will learn or develop aspects of speaking and listening (Indonesian), measurements of ingredients of flour, water and sugar (mathematics), how material change, say from separate substances into a cooked cake (science).

 Simple though baking looks like, professional teachers will do it with informed plan and with specific attainments in mind, namely to understand and use Indonesian as a means of communication, to develop mathematical understanding for real life, to learn scientific and technological understanding. In the final analysis, all of these are for the sake of human development, health and well-being.

A Chaedar Alwasilah ; 

A Professor at the Indonesian Education University Bandung, A Visiting Researcher at Christ Church University, Canterbury, United Kingdom

JAKARTA POST, 19 Oktober 2012

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