The Future of Education

Recent education reforms in Indonesia are a testimony of the country’s commitment to competency-based education, where the emphasis is placed on higher-order thinking skills. The policies are in place, but what vision of competencies informs how Indonesian academics go about embracing change? This paper reports on a research study that engaged English language teacher educators in Indonesia and investigated their perspectives of the teaching of critical reading. Understanding these perspectives is important if the country is to progress its new education reforms. Arguably, this knowledge should provide policy-makers and higher education institutions with insights regarding the needs of the academic community and questions for further research. The findings reported in this paper suggest that Indonesian academics identify what skills are involved in critical reading and how to teach them, but not why they choose a specific teaching practice. Based on this finding, the researchers argue that in the absence of a rationale that would link the “What?” and the “How?” of teaching, missing are perspectives that would demonstrate the lecturers’ understanding as to why the skills and the teaching methods they use to teach critical reading skills should have a transforming effect on the students. However, a brief literature review showed that Indonesian scholars are working within scholarly paradigms, that currently dominate critical reading pedagogy in English-speaking parts of the world, that too are challenged to offer principles for transformative learning. The generally accepted teaching practice is to make text the primary focus of a reading activity, not the larger context of influences that impact on the students’ engagement in reading. Reading thus is seen a series of “carefully” designed activities (the “How?” of teaching) that aim to invest students in the agenda (the “What?” of teaching) that underpins these designs. On the other hand, reading as an investment on the part of students in situations where they can augment, and thereby transform, the meaningfulness of their lives is, by and large, missing in the mainstream paradigms. The study discusses implications of its findings for further research and practice using Lian and Pertiwi’s (2017) framework for research evaluation.

Keywords: transformative pedagogies, critical reading;