Neoliberal ideology, faith-based higher education institutions, and English in Indonesia: negotiating English teachers’ ideological formation

ABSTRACT

This paper reviews the ongoing engagement of neoliberal ideology in Indonesian higher education institutions and in commodifying the global spread of English. With the growing number of faith-based higher education institutions in Indonesia, the neoliberal and English ideologies are contested and promulgated, creating ambivalent spaces. This complex entanglement of ideologies begs us to examine how they are appropriated by English teachers who are at the front line in translating the ideologies. In this respect, I argue that Bakhtin’s construct of ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Transalted by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press) has explanatory power that may help understand teachers’ ideological formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• English education
• faith-based higher education institutions
• English teachers’ ideology
• ideological becoming

Acknowledgment

This paper was developed based on my doctoral thesis. I am immensely grateful to Prof. Alex Kostogriz and Dr. Jennifer Bleazby of Monash for their critical feedback and wonderful conversations that helped me develop the ideas of this piece of writing. Furthermore, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided excellent comments on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Muhalim Muhalim

Muhalim Muhalim earned his doctoral degree in TESOL (Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages) at the Faculty of Education Monash University, Australia. Muhalim’s doctoral research is based on Dialogic approach to investigate religious discourses in English language teaching and learning. He is currently working as a lecturer at Universitas Negeri Makassar, Indonesia.