REFRAMING SERVICE-LEARNING IN CURRICULUM REFORM IN TESOL TEACHER EDUCATION IN INDONESIA
Abstract
The common practice in TESOL teacher education in Indonesia is to assign their students to do service-learning in secondary school in the third year of a four-year undergraduate degree program. In the wake of curriculum reform in 2010, some TESOL teacher education institutions made a different approach by requiring students to be engaged in service-learning from the first year of their program. This study aims to describe the service-learning in a TESOL teacher education institution in Indonesia and to explore students’, teacher educators’, and service users’ perspectives in service-learning. The data was collected through in-depth interviews with three students (sophomore, junior, and senior), a teacher educator, a supervising schoolteacher, and a school principal. The study shows that service-learning was considered as a mutual symbiotic relation between students and school. During the service-learning, students faced a variety of challenges, including pedagogical, personal, and team challenges. The study also reveals that assessment became one of the major issues in service-learning. One enlightening finding from this study is that students received adequate orientation about school contexts prior to service-learning. The orientation evidently was able to bridge the gap between TESOL theory and practice during service-learning.