How Can ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education

How Can ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve  
the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation?
A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education
Iwan Syahril, PhD

Sampoerna University

A Keynote Speech presented at the International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching,  
English Language Education Study Program, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018

AGENDA
1. Education in the State of Emergency

2. Quality Teaching, Quality Teachers

3. A New Generation of Teachers

4. Education Transformation:  
Starting from (English Language) Teacher Education

5. Potential Challenges
!2How Can An ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education | Iwan Syahril, PhD International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching, Sanata Dharma University, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018

!3
The Art of Seeing
the Trees
and the Forest
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sO2G4ImIkHI
How Can An ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education | Iwan Syahril, PhD International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching, Sanata Dharma University, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018

Language Teaching
!4
Language Teacher Education
Language Teachers

1. Education in the  
State of Emergency

The problem of learning
• Schooling does not translate into learning.

• The ability to read texts does not translate
into the ability to understand them.

- 95% literate level in Indonesia.

- Students: 86% of Indonesian students
(15-years of age) have the lowest literacy
level (PISA, 2015).

- Adults: The literacy level of Indonesian
adults with tertiary education is lower than
the one of average OECD countries with
upper secondary education (PIAAC, 2015).

!7
Source: OECD. (2018). PISA for developing reading framework.  
Retrieved from: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/9789264305274-4-en.pdf?expires=1543556026&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=9D76FBC01DAF8EF5243EA96FBD01C44C

Source: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/need-pivot-learning-new-data-adult-skills-indonesia
Professor Lant Pritchett,

Harvard University
years
1 2 8

!9
Secondary education
graduates had to
complete reading
more than 30 novels
in 4 foreign languages!

Source: Pritchett, L. (2018). 15 years of education in Indonesia: rising enrolment
and flat learning profiles: Commentary by Lant Pritchett. Centre for Education
Economics CIC. Retrieved from https://riseprogramme.org/sites/
www.riseprogramme.org/files/inline-files/CfEE_ARD2017-18_Pritchett.pdf
“Indonesian youth would be
ready for the 21st century
in the 31st century” (Pritchett, 2018).
The Indonesia Family Life Survey (IFLS)*

from 2000 to 2014, to a cohort of 18- to 24-year-olds

1/3-1/6=?
The increase was from 31.2% per cent (2000)

to 31.4% per cent (2014) or 0.2% per cent in 14 years
* RAND, Universitas of Indonesia, Universitas Gadjah Mada

2. Quality Teaching,
Quality Teachers

Research on Eﬀective Teaching in the US  
(Good, Wiley, & Florez, 2009)
Timeline Focus
1950s—1960s
Who teachers are
teachers’ personal characteristics (e.g., creativity, warmth)
1970s-1980s
How teachers behave
what teachers do and

how their behavior impact student learning
Research interest moved to
students – what they saw, felt and
did

Mid 1980s What teachers believe
Late
1980s-1990s
How teachers teach (knowledge and skills)
how teachers teach diﬀerent subject matter & teachers’
knowledge of how to teach subject matter
2000s
Learning environment
Research moved beyond teachers and students to focus upon the learning environment

The complexity of teaching
using chess analogy.
13How Can An ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education | Iwan Syahril, PhD International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching, Sanata Dharma University, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018

14How Can An ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education | Iwan Syahril, PhD International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching, Sanata Dharma University, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018

Teacher quality
makes a diﬀerence!

On Teacher Quality (Kennedy, 2010)
Lacks of clear meaning, hence teacher qualities, to explicitly show there are
many facets and the need to be clear what kind of qualities we want. Different
stakeholders use different definitions for their purposes.
Teacher Quality as… Possible rationale
Tested ability For recruitment — people with higher test scores become teachers
Credentials  
(certificate, experience)
For equitable distribution of teachers across student populations
Ability to reason and learn
from experiences
For foundations to continue to grow over time.
Classroom practices
What matters are the things teachers actually do inside the classroom when
teaching students
Effectiveness in raising
student achievement
For the most productive use of expenditures
Beliefs and values For adjusting to community and school culture
!16
Professor Mary M. Kennedy,

Michigan State University

Sorting Out Teacher Qualities (Kennedy, 2008)
1.Personal resources: those teachers bring with them to their jobs

• beliefs, attitudes, and values

• personality traits

• knowledge, skill, and expertise

• credentials

2.Performance: those related to teachers' day-to-day work

• practices that occur within and outside the classroom

• learning activities provided for students

3.Eﬀectiveness: those that refer to teachers' impact on students

• fostering student learning

• motivating students

• fostering personal responsibility and social concern
Imagesource:https://workingnation.com/300k-credentials-us/Imagesource:https://www.huﬃngtonpost.co.uk

Teacher Quality in the field of Second Language Teacher
Education: Knowledge Base for Language Teachers
Three strands of knowledge base in SLTE (e.g., Richards, 2008; Johnson, 2000, 2009, & Farrell, 2018):
1990s1950s-1960s 1980s
2018
“Knowledge about” — related
to the content of language and
language learning, the structure
of the language, and some
largely mechanistic pedagogy to
transfer the knowledge to
students (behaviorist paradigm).
How language teachers learn to
teach — influenced by the social
nature of learning, that learning is
situated within certain settings and
contexts that influence how learning
takes place (Lave & Wenger, 1991).
This view is drawn on sociocultural
theory (Freeman & Johnson, 1998;
Johnson, 2009).
“Knowledge how,” —
related to how language
teachers should teach,
classroom teaching skills and
pedagogic issues, and
includes concepts such as
pedagogical content
knowledge (Shulman, 1986),
or often shortened as PCK.

3. A New Generation
of Teachers

21st Century Students
“Twenty-first century students live in an
interconnected, diverse and rapidly
changing world. Emerging economic,
digital, cultural, demographic and
environmental forces are shaping young
people’s lives around the planet, and
increasing their intercultural encounters
on a daily basis. This complex
environment presents an opportunity and
a challenge. Young people today must
not only learn to participate in a more
interconnected world but also appreciate
and benefit from cultural
differences” (OECD, 2018).
!20
Image Source: https://apps.carleton.edu/voice/?story_id=903935&issue_id=903695

Let’s go to Finland!

!22
Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu_5Xvy-S9s

Finland’s Education Transformation: 
Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
• Starting 2016, all basic schools (students aged 7 to 16)  
in Finland have gradually introduced and implemented  
a new curriculum framework using an interdisciplinary  
approach in the teaching and learning, called  
“phenomenon-based learning” or learning by topics.

• In this approach, students use a topic (e.g., climate change, immigration, water) and
look at it through multiple lenses from various subjects/disciplines.

• This approach transforms the traditional school approach, which usually divides
learning into individual subjects such as math, language, chemistry, geography, etc.
Instead, students learn all required knowledge and skills from across subjects by
examining phenomena as a whole, like in the real-life context, utilizing the 21st century
skills such as critical thinking, creativity, innovation, teamwork and communication.
!23
Image source: http://www.uniarts.ﬁ/uutishuone/arts-and-culture-could-help-
ﬁnnish-schools-reach-new-heights-excellence

Professor Kirsti Lonka
Professor of Educational Psychology,  
University of Helsinki, Finland
“Traditionally, learning has been deﬁned as a list of subject
matters and facts you need to acquire.…But when it comes to
real life, our brain is not sliced into disciplines in that way; we
are thinking in a very holistic way. And when you think about the
problems in the world - global crises, migration, the economy,
the post-truth era - we really haven't given our children the tools
to deal with this inter-cultural world. I think it is a major mistake
if we lead children to believe the world is simple and that if they
learn certain facts they are ready to go. So learning to think,
learning to understand, these are important skills - and it also
makes learning fun, which we think promotes wellbeing.”
!24
Why
Phenomenon-
based Approach? Image source: https://www.prodigygame.com/blog/interdisciplinary-teaching-activities-examples/

Benefits of Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning
(You, 2017)
• It facilitates higher-order thinking skills, such as
problem-solving, critical thinking, metacognitive
reflection, etc.

• It expands the explanatory capacity of knowledge
and provides the additional richness of viewing the
topic through multiple lenses.

• It can make learning easier, more realistic and more
useful to the student.

• It improves students’ affective gains (motivation,
participation, self-driven).
ImageSource:https://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/what-are-the-benefits-interdisciplinary-study

How does Finland do it?
Gradually and Carefully
• Building a strong teacher education system

• The strong teacher education system produces teachers  
with solid knowledge, skills and dispositions to be lifelong learners.

• The practices of the phenomenon-based approach in Finnish schools did not start
in 2016, but in mid 1990s when Finnish comprehensive schools started to prepare
their own school-speciﬁc curricula and some schools chose to implement an
integrated teaching and learning approach.

• Thus, by 2016, 20 years later, when Finland decided to implement the
phenomenon-based approach as the national curriculum, most teachers are
already familiar with this approach.

• Even so, Finland decided not to rush in the implementation. Rather, they started
small from 2016, and gradually implementing it fully by 2020.
Imagesource:https://synergie.pt/pt/articles/volume-de-negocios-no-1-semestre-de-2015

4. Education Transformation:  
Starting from (English Language)
Teacher Education

An Interdisciplinary (Integrated)
Teacher Education Program!

!29
What is Interdisciplinary?What is Interdisciplinary?
An Analogy Using Tangrams

!30
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UseaC4PN7c8

!31
What is Interdisciplinary?
Image source: https://slideplayer.com/slide/9224630/
Image source: https://kbrookepierson.wordpress.com/2014/07/14/what-exactly-is-a-transdisciplinary-approach-and-what-does-it-mean-for-objectives/

!32
CLEAN WATER?
TRAFFIC JAM?
CLEAN AIR?
GARBAGE?
Imagesource:https://www.ﬁnchandbeak.com/1206/mapping-the-sdgs-your-business-priorities.htm
COMPASSION?
QUALITY EDUCATION IS THE HUB OF ALL!

!33
Why English Language
Teacher Education Programs
as Agents of Change?
Source:https://tenor.com/search/why-not-gifs

Why English Language Teacher Education Programs as Agents of Change?  
1. English Mastery
• The mastery of English language is the core emphasis  
— a clear advantage in developing nations.

• The ability to receive and produce multimodal texts in English language and
to comprehend many themes across disciplines in English language.
Image source: https://blog.udemy.com/spoken-english-tips/ Image source: http://mde.edu.vn/chia-se-kinh-nghiem-luyen-ki-nang-tieng-anh/

Why English Language Teacher Education Programs as Agents of Change?
2. Multiliteracies
• Recent work in literacy provides a foundation for an integrated
learning.

• What is now considered as literacy goes beyond the ability to engage
with a print text format but it includes multiple literacies in multiple
modalities (New London Group, 1996).

• With the broader view of literacy and literacy teaching inspired by the
New London Group, L2 and FL learning shifts the focus of language
learning from “what texts mean in an absolute sense, [to] what people
mean by texts, and what texts mean to people who belong to diﬀerent
discourse communities” (Kern, 2002, p. 2).

• This broader view of literacy and literacy teaching calls for an L2/FL
language curriculum that integrates language, culture, and literature.

• Content literacy has the potential to maximize content acquisition.
Imagesource:https://teachingmultiliteracies.weebly.com/why-are-multiliteracies-
important-for-the-literacy-development-of-middle-and-upper-primary-learners.html
Imagesource:https://www.amazon.com

Why English Language Teacher Education Programs as Agents of Change? 
3. Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)
• An interdisciplinary teacher education that has a
language teacher component could be regarded as an
expansion of Content and Language Integrated
Learning (CLIL) or Content Based Instruction (CBI)
approach in language learning.

• CLIL is deﬁned as “educational methods in which
‘subjects are taught through a foreign language with
dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content, and
the simultaneous learning of a foreign
language”’ (Marsha, 2002, as cited in Bonces, 2012, p.
179).

• The main diﬀerence, however, is that in an
interdisciplinary teacher education, the teacher is
trained to be the specialist in both the language and
the content.
Image source: http://cltcms.vtc.edu.hk/content-and-language-integrated-learning-clil/

An Example of  
Interdisciplinary Teacher Education
• A special certificate on interdisciplinary teaching focusing  
on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) with  
four subject specialist qualifications: natural science education,  
social studies, education for sustainable development,  
and bilingual instruction.

• Student teachers learn content knowledge and  
pedagogical content knowledge in two disciplines in natural science  
and/or social science, in bilingual instruction, in ESD and complete integrated practical modules.

• Part of the program outcomes are:

✓ teachers are able to transfer (inter-)disciplinary content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge to
design learning environment for ESD,

✓ develop, test teaching concepts regarding climate change, biodiversity, resource conservation, etc.

✓ cooperate with schools and outdoor education institutions,

✓ motivate for SD-related lifestyle, and

✓ motivate to participate in the society.
Natural
Science
Social
Studies
Bilingual
Instruction
Education for
Sustainable
Development
Four specialist qualifications
Certificate for
Interdisciplinary Teaching
Bögeholz,S. (2018). Qualifying Teacher Students for ESD – A Cer:ficate
for a Specialist Qualifica:on at the University of Goe@ngen .

Potential Challenges
1. The ﬁeld is still struggling with the theory and practice
divide (Farrell, 2018).

2. In developing nations such as Indonesia, the concern
about English language mastery is very deep, and it
strongly inﬂuences how English teacher education
programs shape their programs.

3. “Flexible” teacher education: “serving many masters”

4. Interdisciplinary teaching calls for  
a new teacher identity and institutional culture.
Image source: https://fromthepews.blog/2012/06/11/the-theory-and-practice-divide/

“The quality of an education system cannot
exceed the quality of its teachers.” 
“The quality of teachers cannot exceed the
quality of their teacher educators and
teacher education programs.”
!39
Education
System
Teachers
Teacher
Education &
Teacher
Educators

Imagesource:https://thispublicdiary.com/2016/01/05/past-present-future-what/

–Abraham Lincoln
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the
stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difﬁculty
and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we
must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall
ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Ki Hadjar Dewantara’s Core Philosophy: 
CHANGE! (kodrat alam, kodrat zaman)
Principles for Change
Continuity
Convergence
Concentric
!42
Image source: http://bobo.grid.id/read/08674114/ki-hajar-dewantara-bapak-pendidikan?page=all

CHANGE!
THEIR FUTURE!
Image source: https://medium.com/gec-network-musings/the-time-is-now-for-growing-global-citizens-46d581852625

How Can ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the
Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A
Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education
Iwan Syahril, PhD

Sampoerna University

QUESTIONS?  
Email: iwan.syahril@sampoernauniversity.ac.id
A Keynote Speech presented at the International Language and Language Teaching Conference: Issues in Language and Language Teaching,  
English Language Education Study Program, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 30 November-1 December, 2018
!44

How Can ESL/EFL Teacher Education Improve the Education Quality of, and Transform, A Nation? A Proposal for Interdisciplinary Teacher Education

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