Alumni Conference, Manila 2007

As an active alumnus of State Dept Exchange program, the American Embassy invited me to participate in the Regional Exchange Alumni Conference in Manila. The cost was fully financed by the Embassy. I flew Singapore Airlines and stayed 3 nights at 5-star hotel Hyatt Hotel in Manila. I loved the trip so much!!

On October 2 -5 2007, I, and other Indonesian delegates (Shita of the US embassy Jakarta, Esti of the US Consulate Surabaya and Silvia of 2005 alumna) had the opportunity to participate in the Regional Exchange Alumni Conference Manila, Philipines hosted by the IVP-Phils, the International Visitor Leadership Program Alumni Association of the Philippines.

The two-day conference began with a gathering at the US embassy Manila and speeches from Deputy Chief of Mission Paul Jones, Philippine House of Representatives Congressman Roman Romulo, and IVP-Phils founding members, Aniceto Sobrepena and Adolfo Suzara. The evening reception resumed beautifully with a series of art, dances, and musical shows on “Arts Across Borders” at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. I personally met many great and active personnel of the Philippines alumni that formed the very active organization IVP-Phils that I can learn a lot from. In addition, I had valuable conversations about the success stories of alumni activities with the delegates from other different countries such as Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, PNG, Australia, Taiwan, and other East Asia and Pacific countries. I posed with Silvia and Suzanne Weinerman, Global Alumni Coordinator.

The tight-schedule-two-day conference has given us, the Indonesian alumni, fruitful lessons with a variety content of activities such as plenary sessions, workshops, country situation sharing sessions, presentations, luncheons, and special site visit to Bulacan province with its warm people, wonderful art, dances and musical performances. It is also an inspiring session for us to boost the existing associations we have here (educator’s alumni and alumni chapters) to work more actively by reaching more alumni personnel to contribute real actions and setting targeted programs to the community and encourage other alumni to network via communication, even though it still seems to be the challenges.

I act as a coordinator of the alumni project of alumni educator’s association establishment which focuses on the teacher development programs and community services. State Alumni Teacher Association Indonesia seeks for the joint work to run a program on digital video conference with the regional exchange alumni to share issues on educational enhancement.

One of the activities was visiting a primary school in Bulacan. The school looked like Indonesian school physically. The building, the environtment, the students in the uniform and the classroom including a traditional seat setting. Well I could tell that not many differences I saw from our public school. I came in to the classroom and had a chance to chat to the students in class. They welcomed me by saying "Mabuhai!". They were very responsive to my questions and were very happy students. The classroom was equipped with a lot of stuffs to support the process of learning such as books, dictionaries, maps, and other teaching aids. It had many displays of students works as well. This school is public and supported by the alumni association in the Philippines.

Thank you especially to US embassy Jakarta which has made this fruitful event possible for me to attend so that I can learn a lot from and also to IVP-Phils and US embassy Manila that provided familial and friendly welcome and all delegates from East Asia and the Pacific for the fruitful sharing. I believe, after being there, this encourages us all to ‘START WITH US…FROM NOW…FROM SMALL THINGS WE CAN DO’ to contribute to the betterment of our community, nation, region, and the world.

5th Asiatefl Conference, KL

Secuil catatan dari partisipasi aktif dalam konferensi Asiatefl, di KL tahun lalu:

My participation in the conference Asiatefl Conference KL, 7-12 June 2007, as a presenter was full-financially sponsored by the Alumni Grant of the US embassy Jakarta.

Day 1: I flew Garuda Indonesia at 11.00 a.m. and landed in KL around 1 p.m. local time. Kuala Lumpur International Airport is a really spectacular airport. It is very modern, comfortable and very well-organized. I am very astonished by the modern architecture it displays. After getting my luggage, I took the KLIA Express train to the city. From the city, I got a taxi to the hotel where I stayed in. In the evening, I went to the conference venue for registration and collecting the materials of the conference.

Day 2: I joined the conference. It was a great opening and opened by the minister of higher education Malaysia. I met new people. One of them was Mr. Too. He is Malaysian and works for the dept. of education Malaysia. He supervises Malaysian public schools in KL. I think it is a good network. Also, I met Ibu Suwarsih Madya who is the Chair of Asiatefl Indonesia and the Professor of Linguistic of UNY, Yogyakarta. Knowing that I work for SF, she expected and welcomed SF to participate in the next conference such as sponsoring great teacher presenters. A number of workshops, demonstrations, presentations, and Plenary sessions by great Int’l speakers take places on the first day. Some that I joined were:

1. Incorporating CALL into communicative language teaching (Mr. Abdul Hadi)
2. Using Project as a springboard to writing in primary classroom (Ms. Allison Lyall, Malaysia)
3. Introducing a Teacher Certification Renewal System in Japan: Problem and Prospects (Hisamura Ken, et. All, Japan)
4. Motivating the reluctant language learners (Mr. T. Nava, Malaysia)
5. Online support for teaching English through English in EFL Teacher Education (Hoo-Dong Kang, South Korea)
6. Using technology in EFL writing classrooms (Seo Yoonsuk, Malaysia)

Day 3: I presented my paper this day. As it was an addendum to the conference, unfortunately my paper presentation was not printed in the programme book. So, I thought that many didn’t know the revised schedule. Poorly, the committee did not announce publicly the changes. There were about 15 audiences coming to my presentation. I talked about “Encouraging students to write through collaborative int’l project. I shared my experience during my teaching years on how to motivate students to write: hook them with people from other country and assign them to write letters each other for a period of one year. Here, I introduced as well how to apply ICT in the classroom for the primary students. Good welcome from the audience and they hoped to work collaboratively in EFL throughout Asia and the globe.

Besides presenting, I also joined some workshops and presentations:

1. Using blogs to develop interest among ESL students (Nadzar Abu Bakar, Malaysia)
2. Preparing pre-service teachers for teaching science using English as the medium of instruction (Peter Hudson, Australia)
3. How Global English is changing the world (Plenary Speaker: David Graddol, England)
4. Elementary teacher English Education programme in South Korea (Im Yong Suk, Korea)
5. The English teacher is on fire: Wearing Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, Koh Soo Ling, Malaysia)

Day 4: Paper Presentations and Workshops that I entered:

1. Movies in ESL writing classrooms (Fariza or, Malaysia)
2. Spoken Grammar, Written Grammar: From Corpus to Classroom (Ronald Carter, UK)
3. Recycling Junk emails (Sheba Doray, Malaysia)
4. Establishing an Intercultural Communication Class Project: Case Study between TaiwanJapan (Joshua Borden, Taiwan & Fumiko Kurihara, japan) and
5. The Power Point as an interactive tool for classroom use (Michael Hughes, Malaysia)
6. Injecting HOPE into the Profession (Michael Rudder, Indonesia)

Day 5: I met some Indonesian students studying in KL and they toured me around the city of KL in the afternoon. I also met an old online friend that I used to correspond via emails. He is Mr. Zait Isa. He organizes school networks and welcomes Indonesian schools to participate in the projects with Malaysian schools. Now, he is running “Independence Day Celebration” for Malaysian schools and asks me to invite Indonesian schools to work collaboratively. At the peak event, the schools will be invited to Malaysia to perform the projects.

Day 6: In the morning, I summarize my stay in KL preparing the report outline. And at 11.00, I departed to the airport to fly back to Jakarta.

Conclusion:
I have gained a lot of learning experience from this Asiatefl conference. Some were very inspiring to excel my teaching performance and I could adopt a lot of new technological applications for my skills. I also learned from other countries such as Japan, Korea, Malaysia and Indonesian fellows from the speakers about some researches and teacher training and education in EFL frameworks.

The next Asiatefl conference will be in Bali, 8-10 August, 2008. Everyone hopes to come again next year.

State Alumni Teacher Association for Makassar English Teacher Workshop

3 days after my return from Pangkal Pinang, I flew to Makassar for one day training of english teacher at UIN Hasanuddin Makassar held by SATA Makassar under leadership of Ratna, alumna 2005. I flew via Surabaya for a meeting with Mike Hannahan, my American host program of my 2005 exchange program from Univ. of Massachussetts. He traveled around Indonesia for speaking at several universities in Jakarta, Denpasar, Surabaya dan Riau.
During the workshop, I enganged participants with coop learning in ESL class. I had them involved in round robin, think-pair-share, and jig saw activities that illustrated how to get students active as learners and produce a lot of english skills outcomes particularly for their speaking skills. I donated a book of ESL activities for them as a resource. Games were part of the program and they laughed a lot and gained much more strategies in developing games. There were about 25 english teachers as beneficiaries of the workshop and they said they had fun and this was satisfying them to get inspired to teach better.