Multilingual Education in Belu, Indonesia Jenny Zhang Save the Children – University Partnerships for Educational Research November 10, 2015 Contents 1. Background and Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 2 a. Purpose of the Report……………………………………………………………………………………p. 3 b. Belu, Indonesia Background…………………………………………………………………………..p. 3 c. BELAJAR program description……………………………………………………………………….p. 4 - Literacy Assessments……………………………………………………………………………….p. 5 - Teacher Training……………………………………………………………………………………...p. 5 - Community Engagement…………………………………………………………………………..p. 6 d. Research Methodology…………………………………………………………………………………..p. 6 2. Historical and Logistical Processes by which BELAJAR has addressed multilingualism a. Findings ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 8 b. Recommendations……………………………………………………………………………………....p. 10 3. Teacher Training and Multilingualism a. Successes and Challenges of Teacher Training………………………………………………p. 11 b. Formative Assessments……………………………………………………………………………….p. 13 c. Best Practices for Multilingual Education……………………………………………………...p. 14 d. Recommendations………………………………………………………………………………………p. 15 4. Partnerships and Multilingualism a. Findings……………………………………………………………………………………………………...p. 17 b. Recommendations………………………………………………………………………………………p. 19 5. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 20 6. Appendices a. List of Interviews and Focus Group Discussions……………………………………………p. 21 b. List of Observation Activities……………………………………………………………………….p. 22 7. Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………….p. 23 1 1. Background and Introduction1 Imagine you are a student whose parents have migrated to another part of Indonesia or to another country to work, and you live with your grandparents and siblings. At home, you speak the language that everyone around you speaks – Bahasa Bunak. You know lots of stories and songs in Bahasa Bunak, and your friends all speak the same language. You are finally 5 years old and begin attending the local elementary school. It is your first time at school; there is no kindergarten or early learning center in your village. When you start at school, you realize that you must learn a whole other language which your teacher speaks, and which you have only heard occasionally. Now, imagine you are a teacher in the same village. You speak Bahasa Indonesia but at home you speak Bahasa Bunak. Your village is only one kilometer from the border, on the West Timor side. Each year, you receive 25 new 5-6 year olds who speak very little Bahasa Indonesia, if at all. Most of your students speak Bahasa Bunak, so you can translate for them every aspect of the school curriculum, but there are 5 students who speak Bahasa Tetun Therik. With those children, you will have to use more inventive methods. How can you teach everybody to read and write in Indonesian, when they do not yet understand it? Most of the children have never been to a preschool or kindergarten, because the only early learning center ran out of funding last year. Some of them have never held a pencil or pen. This describes the situation at School A, a BELAJAR program school in Belu, West Timor, Indonesia. BELAJAR is an adapted2 version of Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program, which works to promote literacy skills in the early grades through three avenues: community engagement, teacher training, and literacy assessment. A key difference between BELAJAR and Literacy Boost programs in other parts of Indonesia is that in Belu, there is a high degree of linguistic diversity, even within single communities. The BELAJAR approach is to frame mother tongue language skills as a potential resource for both literacy and content learning in the early grades, rather than as a barrier to learning. School A is located just over the border from East Timor. Several of the teachers at School A moved to the village during the conflict, and speak different languages at home than their students. The majority of students at School A use Bahasa Bunak at home, with their families and friends, and at church. A minority of students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik. Almost none of the students come into their first year of school with working knowledge of Bahasa Indonesia. For students and teachers at School A, BELAJAR has ushered in big changes, especially related to teaching and learning processes in the mother tongue. 1 The research for this report was made possible by the generous and talented staff BELAJAR and Save the Children Indonesia. Katherine Brown, Nikhit D’Sa, and Christine Jonason, from Save the Children USA, provided critical support and feedback throughout the research and writing process. I would like to thank them all for their contributions to this report. 2 Some training modules from the Literacy Boost Teacher Training Toolkit were eliminated while others were added because of local needs. One example is an additional module on School-Based Management (SBM), which is a key change in the operational structures of Indonesian schools. 2 a. Purpose of this report This report is a case study that highlights the effectiveness and limitations of BELAJAR, Save the Children’s Literacy Boost program in Belu, in addressing literacy skills across multiple languages through in-school and out-of-school interventions. By conducting classroom observations, interviews, and focus groups, and analyzing BELAJAR program documents, I explored three aspects of the BELAJAR program: its approach to multilingualism both in and out of the classroom, its teacher training, and finally, BELAJAR’s relationships with key stakeholders and partners. The three research questions are: 1. What is the process (historical and logistical) by which Save the Children has worked to address the multilingual nature of child literacy in the BELAJAR project? 2. How has teacher training been leveraged to address multilingual education for children? 3. What relationships and partnerships has the project leveraged to address the issues of multilingualism among participants in BELAJAR? This report also offers recommendations to further enhance the program, at the end of each section. b. Where is Belu? Belu is a regency on the Indonesian side of the border with East Timor, in Nusa Tenggara Timor Province in Eastern Indonesia. The 1999 conflict and subsequent exodus of people from East Timor into Belu bears a relationship to the linguistic diversity of the area today; refugees from East Timor and internally displaced peoples from Indonesia settled in Belu, each bringing their own mother tongue. Today, there are 5 major mother tongue languages (in addition to the national language, Bahasa Indonesia) spoken in Belu: Bahasa Tetun Therik, Bahasa Tetun Portu (spoken by many who moved from East Timor), Bahasa Bunak, Bahasa Dawan, and Bahasa Kemak. Additionally, there are smaller linguistic communities in Belu, such as a community from Southeast Sulawesi Island that speaks Bahasa Buton. Because of the remoteness of the area, and the fact that resettlement occurred in recent history, there are not precise statistics on language breakdown in Belu. However, according to the Save the Children context analysis, conducted before the 3 BELAJAR intervention began, approximately 20% of students speak Bahasa Tetun Therik at home, and another 15% speak a different local language at home. In reality, those percentages mask the radical variability within the regency. Though students in Atambua, the capital city, may speak only Bahasa Indonesia at home, 100% of students in other areas may speak Bahasa Dawan, or 70% Bahasa Bunak and 30% Bahasa Kemak in yet another area. “Bahasa ibu… itu bahasa budaya” is a phrase I heard repeatedly in many interviews. It means, “the mother tongue is the language of culture”; without the mother tongue, many cannot imagine conducting important cultural rites and rituals. Whether in connection to the preservation of cultural traditions or simply to more effective learning, many in Belu agree on the importance of mother tongue language usage. The multilingual context affects the teaching and learning process in and outside of schools. At many Literacy Boost sites around the world, students may use different languages at home and at school. In Belu, however, nearly all students use a different language at home and there is a superdiversity (Goebel, 2015) of languages in the region.3 Thus, there may be two or more local languages spoken by the students and the teacher in one classroom. The languages and linguistic compositions of classrooms vary widely across the regency. The situation in classrooms is further complicated by the fact there is widespread confusion about government policies about language of instruction. The National Education Law of 1989 specified that Bahasa Indonesia should be the language of instruction in all classrooms. However, the National Education Law No. 20 of 2003 specifies in article 33 that: “local languages may be used as language of instruction in early grades if necessary in order to deliver knowledge and/or certain skills.” Though the national education law has been amended to allow the use of local languages, many teachers and principals stated that before the BELAJAR training, they felt that they must use Bahasa Indonesia at school. Further, as several Save the Children Indonesia staff pointed out, there is a political valence in the push to use Bahasa Indonesia in Belu. Given Belu’s proximity to the national border with East Timor, the use of Bahasa Indonesia may seem more nationalistic than the use of Bahasa Tetun, the national