It was a lovely event who was staffed by some outstanding volunteers (students). They had plenaries and breakout sessions they called parallels. There were many participants from far flung corners of Indonesia on some islands I've never heard before. No surprise considering the Indonesian Archipelago has 18, 307 islands. It has the fourth largest population in the word. It also is home to the worlds most populated island in the world... Jawa. Half of the countries population calls Jawa home. The Jakarta metro area is the 3rd largest in the world with over 30 million people. You can only imagine the crawl of traffic at times throughout the day.
The opening ceremony had some speakers high ranking people from the two collaborating universities and a minister of a governmental department. They mentioned there has been 60 years of cooperation between the academic communities of Malaysia and Indonesia; however, this was the first conference on English. At the moment 80% of the public universities of Malaysia are involved in IMELT. It was mentioned the shared history between the two nations, prior to them becoming nations. The Melaka Sultanate was formed by a prince from the ancient Srivijaya (Jawa and Sumatra) civilization. Many of the current royal families in Malaysia can trace their roots to Jawa.
Although the two languages (Bahasa Malaysia & Indonesia) share some words, they are divergent. Bahasa Indonesia has a stronger Arabic influence than Bahasa Malaysia, Arabic is its number one source of share words. The separate colonial occupations of the British & the Dutch contributed to more divergence. The historical shadow of the Dutch is the cause of the biggest challenge facing English language learning in Indonesia. Unlike Malaysia, where English is an official second language, Indonesia considers English as a foreign language. This impacts the prioritisation of funds and influence English learning faces from a national to a local level. Although in the job market, English speaking skills are highly desirable.
The conference was power packed. I learned lots of new things and met some new compadres. Most of the breakout sessions were dissertations of papers educators wrote and presented. A sample of some of the sessions I went to was Teacher Education: Preparation or Preparedness?, Text Driven Approaches to Text-Based Learning, Gender and Foreign Language Learning and Developing Effective Professional Program Based Teacher on Educational Effective Research.
I had a parallel session on Friday and a plenary on Saturday. The 25 minute session was on the Qualities of a 21st Century Teacher. A good question from one of the participants was how to handle a co-worker who does not want to update skills. My advice was always treat your co-worker respect, it is unimaginable everybody will update their skills and keep collaborating and grinding forward thinking methods with colleagues who do.
My plenary was based on the Role of the Teacher in the 21st Century classroom. My session was more like a training infused with motivation. As always, I struggle with time issues. We discussed the success and the applicability of the Shang Hai model in Malay educational world. In this part of the world teachers are burdened with many administrative responsibilities that detract from teaching. This growing burden is fueled by MoEs trying to juggle shrinking budgets. Shang Hai has posted some of the highest PISA scores in the world. Its student population is diverse in terms of socio-economic and urban/rural backgrounds. The effectiveness of their model is a teachers spend a third of their time in ongoing professional development or mentoring. Teachers get time and support to increase their skillset which correlates into a better education for the students. My mission was accomplished by the end of the session, the participants were pivoted to become awesome teachers.
This conference as opened my eyes and my concern to the growing demands for English language learning in Indonesia. It also reconfirmed my memory, Indonesian people are lovely and their food is tasty.
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