Pedagogy and English Language: Examining the synchronicity of global and local teacher education policy and EFL teacher education in constituting quality EFL Teacher in Indonesia

This paper reports findings from a research project that explored, among other things, the textual construction of the ‘quality’ teacher by global and local education policy discourse. More specifically the study focused upon synchronicity between global and local education policies with regard to the constitution of the quality teacher in the specific context of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Indonesian teacher education. Like other nation-states in the region, Indonesia maintains an investment in equipping citizens with skills to successfully participate in this current era of intensifying globalisation. In reproducing many of discursive tropes from global policy discourse in relation to quality and education, Indonesia places some of the responsibility for the achievement of global education agendas squarely within the domain of teacher education more generally; and the teaching of EFL in particular.

Conducted mostly in teacher education settings in Java, the research project was theoretically informed by the work of Arjun Appadurai and his representation of globalisation as a series of flows along various ‘scapes’. Appadurai’s framework for understanding globalisation was used to interrogate a number of key global and local policy texts, in addition to the views of EFL students at two teacher training institutions in Java, Indonesia.

Central to Appadurai’s framework is a recognition of the interrelationships between various global flows, which can be characterised by the presence of synchronicity and also disjuncture; a disjuncture that is perhaps nowhere more significant than in the context of learning English as a foreign language in a Non-western nation-state such as Indonesia. It is against this context that this paper presents findings from a research project which explored teacher education policy texts and how they construct the quality teacher.

The findings of this research project, some of which are reported here, show that some of the flows associated with globalising English which are welcomed in local level. Like all languages, English is enmeshed in a variety of socio-economic, political and historic, if not religious encumbrances, a number of which will be identified below. Discussion in this paper thus identifies instances of synchronicity between the various global flows associated with the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language in teacher education as manifest in policy. It is in relation to these instances that this paper asserts that our understanding of the ‘ideal’ teacher must emerge from a critically productive reading of the often ‘topographically flat’ policy discourses that inform teacher education in Indonesia.