Redesigning Teacher Education Programs in Indonesia:
Coping with Ethnocentrism
Luciana
One of the major problems prevailing in teacher education
programs in Indonesia
is that their curriculum is heavily characterized by western teaching
paradigms. Particularly, communicativeness and interactiveness of teaching and
learning processes seem to be blindly subscribed to as the only navigation.
While such an ethnocentric view is likely to accord with the nature of English
learning and benefit learners, concern needs to be placed on the trainees’
awareness of transfering the exclusiveness of Western-laden perspectives in
socioculturally dynamic classrooms they encounter. Owing to this challenge,
this study argues for a teacher training course design sensitive to learners’
underlying socio-cultural perceptions about learning. At this juncture, this
study proposes “an analytical methodological options microteaching framework”
within which the trainees develop a critical and alert attitde toward teaching
components they utilize by making links and matching these with a selected
classroom condition. besides, the framework also
builds in experiential training and trainees’ self-assessment. In so doing, the
micro teaching goes beyond the dominant supervised feedback giving, which
generally becomes the prime ingredient of the training. Eventually the
framework also nurtures the trainees’ teaching autonomy.
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Luciana. (2006, April). Redesigning
teacher education programs in Indonesia: Coping with Ethnocentrism. Paper presented at the 41st RELC International
Seminar, Singapore.