Revitalizing Academicians Literacy in Indonesia
Monday, 6th
April 2015
Revitalizing Academicians Literacy in Indonesia
By Syarifah Khuraesin
1413132055
TBI A/ 4th Semester
Literacy
is essential to social and human development. Literacy is
more than just the ability to read and write but literacy is life skills which
allows humans to function optimally as a member of society. Despite the literacy is essential, but the literacy
rate of Indonesian students is comparatively low. PIRLS and PISA report that creativity in
writing journal articles and textbooks in academicians Indonesia is weak (Alwasilah, 2012). It shows the failure of language education and literacy teaching in Indonesia.
Thus,
literacy should be revitalized in order to make Indonesia academicians being
literate. In addition, literacy should be modified too. It means modified the
teahing of reading and writing in four dimension: (1) linguistics or text
focus, (2) cognitive or mind focus, (3) sociocultural or group focus, and (4)
developmental or growth focus. While becoming or being literate means learning
to effectively, efficiently, and simultaneously control the linguistic,
cognitive, sociocultural, and developmental dimensions of written language in a
transactive fashion (Kucer, 2005: 4). Any proposed solution should address the
three main aspects related: teacher, curriculum, and language policy.
The
spearhead of literacy are professional teachers. The steps of professional
teachers include: (1) professional commitment, (2) ethical commitment, (3)
analytical and reflective strategy, (4) the self-efficacy, (5) knowledge of the
field of study, and (6) literacy and numeracy Skills (Cole and Chan, 1994 cited
by Setiadi, 2010). Qualification teachers of school in Indonesia are
sufficient. However, they do not acquired sufficient training in managing
classroom activities. So that, teachers need additional training to improve
their performance. In other words, to constructing nation's literacy must be
preceded by constructing professional teacher. Which professional teachers only
produced by a professional teacher education institutions as well.
Besides
providing additional training to teachers, the curriculum should be redesigned
through several ways. One of them is by applying ethnopedagogy and local wisdom
education in the curriculum. Ethnopedagogy defined as activity
of cross-cultural teaching. Ethnopedagogy should be applied from kindergarten
to college, of course with different strategies and implementations. While
local wisdom education is taught in primary and secondary education. The goal
of ethnopedagogy based on local wisdom is to inculcate values, attitudes, and
skills so that students can role optimally as citizens.
Indonesia
is multilingual and multicultural country. It means that many languages exist
in Indonesia. Every Indonesia students
normally learn three language, they are Indonesian language or bahasa, local
language, and foreign language such as English. Indonesian language policy
stated that bahasa or Indonesian language is a nationalist symbol while local languages
are cultural symbols. Nowadays, despite of globalization, the local language
has marginalized by English. Furthermore, many students tend to writing in
English than writing in their local language. So, we need to redefine the
current language policy of ethnic languages and their literature in order to
ethnic or local languages is revived.
In
conclusion, the low rate of literacy is caused by the failure of our education
system. Methods and techniques for teaching literacy is less intellectual. Hence,
we should revitalize literacy in order to make Indonesia academicians being
literate. Moreover, literacy should be modified too. Revitalization literacy
can be done by several way, such as providing additional training to improve teachers
performance, redesigning the curriculum, and redefine the current language
policy. Then, by doing these steps, Indonesia academicians are expected being
literate and Indonesia can be a modern country.
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