Inculcating character education through EFL teaching in Indonesian state schools

ABSTRACT

This paper describes how English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in Indonesia have implemented the recent character education policy within an era of school-based curriculum reform. The character education policy required all teachers, EFL teachers included, to instil certain values in every lesson whilst the school-based curriculum reform permitted teachers to develop locally responsive curriculum content. The design behind the reform seeks to sharpen education’s role as a site of moral inculcation in the face of growing social diversity that threatens social cohesion and the prolonged social problem of massive corruption. Drawing on Durkheim’s distinction between secular and religious morality, this paper considers how the Indonesian curriculum promoted rational or secular moral education and how the EFL teachers enacted religious moral education given religiosity is salient in both the community and schools of Indonesia. Bernstein’s concepts of pedagogic discourse, instructional and regulative discourses were adopted to analyse how EFL teachers have recontextualized both curricular reforms in their micro pedagogic settings. The conclusion suggests that teachers’ implementation of moral education in their classes was dominated by their school communities’ and the teachers’ own preferred value of religiosity. Such values played out in their classes through both the regulative discourse and the instructional discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Character education
• EFL teachers
• moral education
• recontextualization
• religious morality
• secular morality

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture under the Dikti scholarship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture under the Dikti scholarship.

Notes on contributors

Uswatun Qoyyimah

Uswatun Qoyyimah completed her PhD research at the Queensland University of Technology in Australia in 2015. She has taught as an EFL teacher (1998–2003) and currently works as a lecturer in the EFL Teacher Education Department of Universitas Pesantren Tinggi Darul Ulum, Indonesia.