Indonesian Teacher Passes New Skills to Thousands of Peers

Within six months of completing an intensive, in-service teacher training program in the United States, Indonesian English Teacher Yuna Kadarisman set out to share her experience and new teaching methodologies with hundreds of her peers in the South Sulawesi province of Indonesia, an area with limited professional development opportunities and resources for teachers.

In partnership with Lembaran Mulia, an association founded by educators to provide seminars and workshops to improve teacher quality in Indonesia, Yuna, along with other internationally-trained teachers, led a series of training workshops across the province, where they presented different international teaching theories and practices. The first two workshops, held in the cities of Makassar and Pare-Pare, attracted 1,800 K-12 teachers across different teaching disciplines. Another two workshops are scheduled for this spring and fall.

Yuna delivered training sessions which focused on how to motivate students and how to develop learning tools with limited resources. These sessions were largely inspired by her internship experience at Groves High School (GHS) in Georgia. Yuna even incorporated an activity that she learned from her American internship host teacher to make a point about engaging students:

“I asked the [workshop] participants to make a piece of origami…It was hard for them but most of them made it. I told them that the sense of accomplishment that they want to feel is the great trigger for them to succeed, just like students. Thus, they have to maintain those feelings if they want to keep students attention in class.”

Yuna also discussed how teachers can play a more active role in developing their own instructional materials. “Teachers can create their own learning tools, or even ask students to create resources. They don’t have to rely on anyone for this.”

According to Yuna, trainings such as these offer unique opportunities to teachers from outside the capital. “We have everything in Jakarta, but in places like Sulawesi or other remote islands, all we can do is broaden teachers’ horizons and make sure that they will be the qualified agent of change for the people around them.”

Yuna Kadarisman was an International Educators Program (IEP) fellow from January to June 2007. IEP, administered by IREX, is a program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the US Department of State that brings outstanding secondary teachers from the Near East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia to the United States for a five-month professional development program that seeks to enhance teachers’ expertise in their teaching discipline and equip them with a deeper understanding of best practices in teaching methodologies, lesson planning, and the use of technology in teaching; create among educators a more nuanced understanding of the United States; develop productive and lasting relationships and mutual understanding between US and international teachers and their students; and contribute to improving teaching in participating countries by preparing participants to serve as teacher leaders, who upon returning home will apply and share their experience and skills with their peers and students.