TEFLIN

John, Ibu Hussai, and me. Ibu Hussai was the first female professor in Southern Sumatra, and is one of John's advisors in Sekayu, a hamlet three hours from the closest major town. Despite Ibu's impeccable English and serious credentials, she shied away from discussing political Islam with us. Maybe, unlike me, she just knows when to avoid a touchy subject.


After a weekend of debauchery and dancing in Surabaya, Monday morning Deanna and I flew to Jakarta. At the Sukarno Hatta International Airport (which was starting to feel like a home away from home away from home), we met-up with thirteen of the remaining seventeen Fulbright ETAs. The other four would be meeting us in Salatiga, where we would all spend the next three days attending the fifty fourth annual Teachers of English as a Foreign Language in Indonesia (TEFLIN) international conference. According to the TEFLIN mission statement, “The objective of TEFLIN is to provide English teachers with opportunities to share and discuss contemporary issues, trends, and development in language teaching, learning, and research.”
Nelly, the Fulbright Indonesia co-coordinator, met us at the airport in Semarang – a large, heavily developed port city in northern Central Java – where she promptly herded us onto a bus for the one hour ride to Salatiga. We slowly began to climb out of the smog and chaos of a typical Javanese city, speeding south through rolling green hills and rice paddies. An hour later, we were in Salatiga, a lovely colonial former Dutch hill station, where we would spend the remainder of the week in yet another four-star hotel, living the high life courtesy of Paman (Uncle) Sam.
The conference was titled “English Language Education Policies: Responding to National and Global Challenges” and was held on the surprisingly gorgeous Satya Wacana Christian University campus. Shuttled to the tree-lined campus courtesy of our hotel, I arrived and thought that I had died and gone to heaven. With a student body of 8,000, there were beautiful, young, and most likely smart and interesting women everywhere. Although I had just spent the weekend in Surabaya, rubbing shoulders with East Java’s glitz and glam set, the contrast between Salatiga and Madiun was still shocking. Whereas in Madiun the only interaction I have with females consists of fending off the “I LOVE YOU, MISTER” cat-calls hurled at me from doting students, on the Satya Wacana campus, most girls wouldn’t even give me the time of day. It was like drinking from the well of psycho-sexual reality, and was a refreshing ego shrink.
Because Satya Wacana is Christian, and only some fifteen percent of the student body is Muslim, jilbabs are a rare sight amongst the students. However, at the same end of the religiously motivated spectrum, the SWCU mission statement proclaims “In order to achieve our mission as a ‘Creative Minority’, we hold this fundamental ideal: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of all knowledge.’” It might not be Muslim, but strict adherence to religious precepts was still pivotal. My admiration for the female student body would just have to remain unrequited.
The conference opened with a set of three rather tedious plenary sessions. However, between interludes of zoning out, dozing off, and catching up on international news and celebrity gossip, I did find one major point very interesting. Dr. Jack Richards, a giant in the field of Teaching English as a Second Language (referred to as TESL, TEFL, TESOL, ESL, and probably a host of other acronyms), lectured to the crowd of five hundred teachers, academics, and journalists about teaching English during dramatically and drastically changing times.
He talked of using English only as a second language, a communication tool, and not as a mechanism of cultural transmission. “We’re talking about an Indonesianized version of English, not some Indonesian-English hybrid, but fluent English spoken as an international language filtered through a local lens.” He differentiated between English the International Language, and American, Australian or British English, all of which come with cultural biases and idioms that can be incomprehensible on a global scale. He gave the example of a woman, one who speaks fluent English, who works for Cambridge University Press in Singapore calling the company headquarters in the UK. After asking where she should send a certain package, the prototypically British response she received involved thirty seconds of incomprehensible balderdash about “Ohwelllet’sseemightaswellrightumyeahwellyoushouldehhmmm…” Even after she had received an answer, she had no idea what had been said.
Dr. Richards’ point was that international English, the lingua franca used for multinational business, politics and social services around the world, should not be connected to any particular culture beyond the international global culture. What then defines the global rubric that speakers and learners should strive for, and who is to say what constitutes global culture, if it isn’t just a mish-mash of hundreds of regional, national, and local tastes? It was an interesting and provocative idea.
In the afternoon, I attended a workshop called “Responding to Globalization: Ideas for Creating Class Activities Within the Global Context.” The jilbab-clad professor in charge of the session elaborated on Dr. Richards’ point, describing how to teach on a local, intimate, comprehensible level while catering to and producing the world’s future global citizens. Much of Dr. Marsaban’s exercise focused on the needed respect for different beliefs, values and cultures, and how to integrate those lessons into the everyday classroom. After dividing the thirty or so people in the room into groups of five, she handed out slips of paper with one of the words “security, tolerance, equality, democracy, freedom, justice, community, and self-reliance” written on each. Each group was told to rearrange the words in order of priority.
The four jilbab-clad Ibus that I was working with put security first, followed by tolerance, followed by justice, followed by community. Democracy came second to last, and self-reliance came last. The exercise was an interesting look into cultural sensibilities, and would work well in a class. As the workshop was wrapping up and chairs were being scraped against the floor, a jilbab-clad Ibu from the back of the room blurted out “What is democracy?” in an unsteady burst of English. I wasn’t sure if she actually didn’t know what the word meant, of if she was just getting in her own personal parting shot.
One of the Ibus who had been in my group was Dr. Ika. We spoke for an hour after class over coffee and Javanese snacks – deep fried meat products and chocolate-cheese quasi-pastries. Dr. Ika was the first female professor in Southern Sumatra, and in her early sixties, currently designs English curricula for college students. After talking for a while, I broached a topic that has been at the front of my mind since arriving in Indonesia. “Bu,” I said, “one of the greatest challenges facing our global community today is the threat from radical Islam. It could stop globalization dead in its tracks and bring the entire world back two centuries. As a moderate Muslim, I would like to ask you, how can we bring those radicalized individuals into our global society? What role should education play?”
The well-respected, jilbab-clad grandmother-like figure took a few seconds to gather her thoughts, and then responded with a quizzical expression on her face. “Why are you interested in these things? I hate politics, it will be the ruin of all good plans. Would you like some more coffee?”

The next day, John, Elena, and I met to have lunch with five female Indonesian students. The night before, we had witnessed their presentation “One Holy Night,” spoken poetry about women and their mistreatment in Indonesian society. The poetry was provocative, and as the girls were all English majors, was for the most part grammatically intelligible, if not correct. We met the girls for Cokes and iced teas at the university canteen, a cement structure in the middle of campus offering pizza, hamburgers, and hot dogs, in addition to the normal smattering of Indonesian food. Three of the girls were wearing sweatshirts despite the eighty degree day, while the other two wore pink t-shirts with slogans like “Suddenly Flower” and “Humanity” artistically emblazoned on the fronts.
Over a table made from a cigarette advertisement, we talked about women and gender studies, American novels, and second hand smoke. “My father pushed me, forced me to study English since I was young,” one of the nineteen year-olds recounted in unsteady English. “When I start university, I want to be faculty psychology, but my father graduated doctor from Washington, D.C., and he want me to know English, so…” Again, it was a pleasure to speak with Indonesian contemporaries who were smart, intelligible, and deeply involved with local culture. In Madiun, my English conversations are limited to banter about (but rarely with) girls, re-hydration beverages, and motorcycles.
TEFLIN was a case in point for me of how academics so often just serve peripheral roles. In Salatiga there were 500 experts in Indo English ed bouncing ideas off one another, yet there were no policy makers in the room. I felt like standing up and shouting, "YEAH, great ideas, now how are you going to actualize them?" A lot of the discourse seemed like self-congratulatory back patting, ultimately achieving little more than the perpetuation of an ineffective system. The failures are obvious, but the policy (as in the US) is dictated from a political platform high above the mud slinging, and thus misses the most pressing issues.