Implementing a Student-Centered Pedagogy: Doing So in the Indonesian Teaching-Learning Context

Today's educators must be willing to shift from the teacher-centered paradigm, which was in place when they themselves were students, to the new paradigm of student-centered education. This article was inspired by the challenges and opportunities experienced by the writers while attempting to implement a student-centered pedagogy. We will share some of our experiences as educators to provide a context for various aspects of student centered-learning. Understanding some of the successes and failures we have experienced in our careers may help to highlight the potential and importance of student-centered pedagogy in its many facets. Based on the vignettes from our teaching experiences, we have identified four major ideas about how to adopt a more student-centered approach: planning lessons that encourage student interest; adapting the curriculum to meet student's needs; using technology in the classroom; and developing mutually respectful relationships.


Introduction
In education today, there are often discrepancies between what teachers plan and what students actually do in their learning process.
This conflict is absolutely one of the things to consider when teachers want to improve the teaching-learning process in their classrooms.
7RGD\ ¶V HGXFDWRUV PXVW Ee willing to shift from the teacher-centered paradigm, which was in place when they themselves were students, to the new paradigm of student-centered education. This article was inspired by the challenges and opportunities experienced by the writers while attempting to implement a student-centered pedagogy. We hope to give a better picture of the necessary conditions for student-centered teaching and learning and to find local wisdom that enables all teaching staff at STAIN Salatiga, and at universities throughout Indonesia, to adopt this new paradigm of education.
We will share some of our experiences as educators to provide a context for various aspects of student centered-learning. Understanding some of the successes and failures we have experienced in our careers may help to highlight the potential and importance of student-centered pedagogy in its many facets. Our shared teaching careers include students on all 6 (inhabited) continents, with ages ranging from primary school students to adults, and we believe that the common themes evident in quite disparate situations speak to the universality of the power of student-centered pedagogy.

Interest
Vignette 1: Tabitha Kidwell I began my career in 2004 as a Peace Corps Volunteer English teacher in a secondary school in a small town in Madagascar. The school was quite underresourced; there were up to 70 students in one class, many of the classrooms did not have electricity, and there were no textbooks available. I had little teaching experience and limited knowledge of the local language and culture. As such, I relied heavily on the national curriculum and teacher-centered classroom activities. Some students were motivated and were able to excel, but far more were disenchanted with my class, the English language, and school in general.
Classroom management, with so many students in one small room, was a major issue. I found I had the most successful time when I built lessons aURXQG DVSHFWV RI WKH VWXGHQWV GDLO\ OLYHV )RU H[DPSOH WKH ³IRRG´ lesson in the national curriculum included apples, bread, and beef as sample vocabulary items, but these did not correspond to the variety of foods that students ate on a daily basis.
I adapted the lesson to include rice, mangoes, beans. and other foods more familiar to students, and I brought in a shopping basket full of the actual items. I presented the vocabulary by removing one item from the basket at a time, slowly and suspensefully. Students were engaged in the presentation and enthusiastic about using their new vocabulary ± many said they were going to teach their family over dinner that evening. By including content that was interesting to the students, as well as teaching methods that elicited their interest, I began to see the power that a student centered pedagogy could have.

Research Review: Interest
Researchers have identified three basic types of interest that contribute to learning: individual interest, situational interest, and, more recently, topic interest.
Individual interest UHIOHFWV VWXGHQWV ¶ SHUVRQDO SUHIHUHQFHV ZKLFK are primarily influenced by their unique personalities. These interests develop over time and have long-ODVWLQJ HIIHFWV RQ D SHUVRQ ¶V preferences, knowledge, and values. This type of interest can be focused on a specific school subject (e.g. science or literature) or specific activites within pop culture (e.g. music, sports, or movies) (Ainley, Hidi and %HUQGRUII +LGL ¶V UHYLew of early research on the effects of individual interest showed that, when provided with material that individual students found interesting, students exhibited higher comprehension and recall, as well as more positive affect, and higher levels of perseverance and attention. This was generalizable across a variety of research studies involving various ages, levels, and subjects. Situational interest is the inherant interestingness of a certain situation. This type of interest often is elicited by something in the environment, such as a text or conversation, and may have only a shortterm effect (Hidi, 1990). This type of interest plays an important role in learning when students do not have pre-existing interest in or knowledge about a certain academic area that is in the curriculum (Hidi and Harackiewicz, 2000). In a review of the research, Flowerday, Schraw, and Stevens (2004) identified several factors that lead to situational interest: text novelty, good organization, ease of comprehension, text coherance, vividness, and imagery.
Interesting stories and texts motivate people to read and positively influence their attitudes, comprehension, memory, depth of processing, and learning (Hidi, 1990). This is true for lectures, as well; lectures that DUH ZHOO FRQVWUXFWHG DQG LQFOXGH FRQQHFWLRQV WR VWXGHQW ¶V H[SHUHLQFHV were shown to be more effective at maintaining student interest levels (Tin, 2008).
If individual interest (which is generated by the student) and situational interest (which is generated by the environment) can be seen as a dichotomy, topic interest can be seen as the interestion of the two.
Topic interest can be defined as the interest elicited by a word, title, or initial text that presents the reader with a topic. A study by Ainley, Hidi, and Berndorff (2002) confirmed that the development of topic interest comes from both individual interest (i.e., students who had previously identified a certain topic as an interest of theirs were more likely to be interested in topics connected to that domain) and situational interst (i.e. DQ LQWHUHVWLQJ WLWOH PLJKW ³JUDE´ VWXGHQWV ¶ DWWHQWLRQ DQG JHW WKHP VWDrted on the path to learning).
The same study also examined the processes inherent in developing topic interest and manifesting its effects. Interest in the topic of a text contributed significantly to positive student affect, which in turn encouraged persistance in working with the material, which then led to improved learning. Interestingly, Shirey and Reynolds (1988) found that adults actually tend to allocate less attention and fewer cognitive resources to information they find interesting, but remember it better, suggesting that they are efficient readers, and do not expend energy on information they will learn without extra effort. is by presenting material in a more meaningful context that shows the importance of the learning or makes it personally relevant to students.

Practical Suggestions: Interest
The more that we can do as teachers to encourage and sustain VWXGHQW ¶V LQWHUHVW WKH PRUH VXFFHVV RXU VWXGHQWV ZLOO KDYH ,GHQWLI\LQJ and using individual interests, such as giving music-related texts to students who enjoy playing guitar, can be highly effective. This can, however, prove quite time-consiming for teachers, especially if there is a high teacher-student ratio (Hidi, 1990). Additionally, not all students have unique and well-developed interests on which to draw (Hidi and Harackiewicz, 2000 An even more cost-effective strategy for teachers with large classes is to focus on developing situational and topic interest. If the class environment stimulates situational interest, students will be more motivated and are likely to make cognitive gains in areas where they initially had very little interest (Hidi and Harackiewicz, 2000). Focus on situational interest is more likely to lead to learning gains for all students.
To do this, teachers must adapt materials or presentation modes to maximize situational interest.  (Flowerday, Schraw, and Stevens, 2004). Structural modification, such as adding or deleting information, can increase good organization and text coherance. Additional details and imagery can be inserted to make texts more vivid. Some texts could also be modified to a context like ³VSDFH DOLHQV´ DV LQ WKH UHVHDUFK E\ &RUGRYD /HSSHU GLVFXVVHG above) simply by changing the names or places. To create text novelty, try to vary the texts used in class, and present them in different ways.
Vividness and imagery can also be created by reading texts with students in class and having students act out or illustrate the stories they hear; you might even ask students to close their eyes and imagine the story as you read it aloud.
For class activities that do not involve texts, remember the power of novelty and suspense. Try to vary class activities so that students are not always stuck in the same routine; while some routine is helpful for

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way to do this is to offer students meaningful choices, like choosing between writing an essay about the life of a historical figure, about an event in their own life, or about a recent television program they saw.
All three options will practice the simple past tense, but the choice will VDWLVI\ VWXGHQWV ¶ QHHGV IRU DXWRQRP\ DQG ZLOO NHHS WKHP PRUH LQWHUHVWHG Lastly, the simplest changes to your presentation style can do wonders to increase student learning. A student once told me about her favorite English teacher, but only detail that she could remember was that the

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introducing vocabulary. What a basic but powerful way to make vocabulary presentations more engaging!

Vignette: H. Triyoko
When I was in junior and senior high school, every school in the province of Jawa Tengah used the same English textbook. At that time, teachers, not exclusively English teachers, were required to teach from books recommended by a higher authority, at the provincial level or even at the national level. These textbooks and the curriculum behind them  (Theisen, Hughes, and Spector, 1990). However, use of the national examination as a means to standardize the Indonesian education has been critisized by many educational practitioners in Indonesia as unfair and misleading.
According to Wirdana (2008), one of the flaws in organizing national exams is its potential to devalue students as individual beings. The gap between regions in Indonesia, in term of education facilities, is wide; therefore, sWXGHQWV ¶ SHUIRUPDQFHV LQ WKH GLVDGYDQWDJHG UHJLRQV VKRXOG QRW be measured with the same criteria used for students in the cities.
Perhaps more importantly, the cultures of various students across the archipelago are ignored when all are taught using an identical curriculum that does not match their own background.
Indonesia is missing out on a powerful phenomenon, for extensive research has showed that cultural contextualization and personalization has a significant effect on student learning. Ross (1983) conducted an interesting study of the effect of adapting the content of a presentation to student background. His context was math story problems, which were adapted to deal with education or health care for groups of pre-service teachers and nurses, respectively. Students who received content that was contextualized to match their background scored higher on post-tests. Therefore, assimilating new information to previous knowledge will be easier if the context is familiar, and therefore meaningful learning will be more likely. In a similar study, Cordova and Lepper (1996) showed that even simple embellishments to contextualize a topic (In their study, a math game designed to practice aritmetic

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not contextualized.) can lead to significant learning gains and higher motivation. Additionally, the personalization of the process (some students had the opportunity to personalize their computer programs, by adding their name and personal details) led to even greater learning gains, as well as, again, increased motivation and involvement.
Personalization can be applied at the cultural level as wellstudents who read stories from their own culture have better understanding and recall than those reading stories from an unfamiliar cultural background; indeed, the cultural background has a greater effect than the syntactic or semantic difficulty of a text (Freimuth 2008 (Ross, 1983, Cordova andLepper, 1996

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This is definitely the area where teachers can get involved in order to help students get the most benefit from using the internet, and if students share what they find, the teacher will benefit, too. Many teachers spend a lot of time selecting and incorporating materials from the internet, but it can be more efficient when teachers seek student contribution in the process. Teachers add rich materials to their own resources by accepting student contributions (Felix, 1998).
Regarding internet-facilitated learning, the roles of teacher may vary. At times they serve as facilitator and guide, or even as coresearcher and a co-learner, for instance when they work with the students to find the most suitable materials to meet student learning objectives, teach to many learning styles, and use in classroom activities.
As the facilitator of learning, teachers need to ascertain that the materials agreed upon by students and teachers will be neither too difficult for students to understand, (therefore discouraging them from involvement in the learning process), or too easy (so that students are not challenged in
At other times, teachers need to be authoritative (but not authoritarian): They need to be a leader and a direct instructor who builds more systematic knowledge than the scattered materials accessed by students through the internet. In coping with the internet-facilitated learning, there are times when teachers are highly recommended to shift the pedagogic orientation from highly student-centered to a more guided investigation and direct instruction and vice versa (Unsworth, 2008) The power of the internet to connect people from all parts of the world will not only change the way teachers teach, but also shape the whole structure of the English teaching and learning processes at schools as the internet also gives many influences in curriculum design, evaluation of student learning, and even the politics of education. Thanks to the many possibilities of the Internet to play a part in English teaching learning at schools, teachers are increasingly aware that traditional EFL classrooms remain a bounded context providing limited opportunities for communicative engagement (Thorne, Black, and Sykes, 2009

Practical suggestion: Technology
With all the ease of getting multimedia materials from the internet and with the existence of a new learning environment that absorbs more

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traditional teaching practices drastically to new teaching practices. They KRSH WR PDNH WKH OHDUQLQJ LQ FODVVURRPV DV HQMR\DEOH DV VWXGHQWV ¶ learning outside classrooms and to do so; they must involve information and communication technology. They often forget the irreplaceable roles of teachers in facilitating, managing, and controlling the learning in the classrooms -this gives us as significant an influence as the materials and the activities of learning.
Thus, English teachers who like to promote internet-facilitated

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process must first develop the awareness that they will and certainly can play an important roOH LQ VWXGHQWV ¶ OHDUQLQJ VLQFH WKH ,QWHUQHW ZLOO QRW GR all the things they do as teachers. As mentioned earlier, the Internet

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because the use of the Internet is not an end in itself but it is just a means to an end. When students do no set particular goals for their engagement with the Internet, and when teachers fail to make these ends clear to students before an internet-EDVHG DFWLYLW\ VWXGHQWV ¶ XVH RI WKH ,QWHUQHW will not give many advantages to their learning in particular. Indeed, the Internet will engage students in more activities which are not necessarily meaningful or helpful for their learning.
,Q RUGHU WR SOD\ WKRVH LUUHSODFHDEOH UROHV LQ VWXGHQWV ¶ OHDUQLQJ particularly when in internet facilitated learning, the suggestions of Quinlan (2011) may be very useful: be well prepared before applying the internet-facilitated learning, be ready for surprises while applying the method, and be wise in selecting ways to measuUH VWXGHQWV ¶ OHDUQLQJ outcomes.
It is not wise to believe that all teachers applying the internet facilitated learning in their classrooms will turn out to be perfect teachers, since these kind of classrooms are not made in one night. Never expect that you will be able to successfully deliver lesson plans including the use of the Internet if you do not give your self sufficient time to get familiar with the kinds of materials provided by the internet and to judge if the materials are really useful and appropriate to achieve students learning objectives. Quinlan (2011) suggests that teachers shall not be trapped by the lure to show off what the Internet can do to make their

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Every website is designed for particular users and goals and thus not all websites have the potential to help students learn. Teachers need to evaluate whether the particular websites they intend to visit during their FODVV UHDOO\ DGGUHVV VWXGHQWV ¶ QHHGV DQG ZKHWher the activities are valuable. Teachers need to determine the possible usage of each website so that students will actually engage in purposeful learning process and not be distracted by the many other activities provided by the Internet.
While evaluating each website before using it in their classroom,

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students will face during their learning. Will all students be able to access the materials and be involved in the activities? Are they all familiar with the Internet, or will some of them become confused with what to do since they are not trained to use it? The degree of experience and expectations that the students have related to the use of the Internet can become a serious problem when teachers ignore it. Many students may resist the use of the Internet because they expect to be taught traditionally and they are not ready for the more autonomous learning experience. For some students it is strange to let the Internet control or guide their learning in the classrooms. Be ready for surprises while applying the Internet, and try to plan ahead for the situations that may occur due to the use of the Internet in your classroom. You also must be ready to apply a contingency plan when the Internet is not accessible due to poor connections or when the electricity is cut off.
Last but not least, while letting students experience the new learning facilitated by the Internet, evaluate the learning process using the same kinds of activities that students are engaged in online. If students are evaluated by measures that do hot relate to their work online, they will not see the value of the online work. For example, teachers can encourage students to spend time watching instructional cooking videos presented in English on You Tube if teachers then assess student performance through role plays where they themselves pretend to be chefs telling how to cook their favorite recipes in English. This is far superior to just assessing their cooking vocabulary mastery through quizzes or written examinations!

Vignette: Tabitha Kidwell
My first salaried teaching position in the United States was teaching secondary students French and Spanish. My first year, like so PDQ\ WHDFKHUV ¶ ILUst years in the classroom, was a nightmare, mostly because of one class. As the most junior language teacher, I was asked to teach the class of students repeating their first year of Spanish. The first year of a language is fairly easy for most students, but these were all students with low academic abilities, behavior issues, and major family problems. They had already attempted Spanish and had failed, and therefore many of them not only were disinterested, but were actively opposed to learning the language, for fear of failing again.  (Marzano & Marzano, 2003). Frymier and Housier (2003) examined the communication skills important to teacher-student relationships. They found that many of the communication skills important to a good friendship are also essential to classroom relationships; this was particularily true for referential skill (explaining things clearly and facilitating understanding) and ego support (giving encouragement, making students feel like valued, empowered participants in the class). While referential skills represent those abilities that are traditionally associated with a good teacher, the importance of ego support skills suggest that there is more to being a good teacher than merely being qualified in the subject matter. When teachers endeavor to create a caring relationship with their students, they create a safe learning environment, where students are more likely to participate, ask questions when they do not understand, and achieve higher levels of learning.
Having conducted a meta-analysis of research related to effective classroom management, Marzano and Marzano (2003) found that a quality teacher-student relationship is the key to good classroom have positive classroom interactions with all students, letting each student know that their learning matters to the teacher.

Practical Suggestions: Relationships
Sometimes, teacher-student relationships develop organically, thanks to personalities of the teacher or the students. That, however, is not always the case, so teachers must consciously attempt to build relationships by adopting certain behaviours.
)RU RQH JHW WR NQRZ VWXGHQWV DV SHRSOH /HDUQ HDFK VWXGHQWV ¶ name and use it to greet them and call on them in class. Chat with students about their interests and lives before, during, and after class. If

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production or athletic competition, make an effort to attend, or simply wish them luck and then follow up by asking how it went.
Secondly, teachers must show the students that they matter. Giles (2011) cites the example of a teacher who, before a lecture on child abuse, made a point of apoligizing if the lecture touched on any painful personal histories; this shows that the teacher cared about the student as a whole being rather than just as the recipient of academic knowledge.
Think about how students might react to sensitive topics, and acknowledge this in class. If a student has been absent, ask them where they have been and if they have talked to classmates to get caught up.
Students who are often absent usually are missing class for a good reason, such as a family or personal issue, and being aware of that situation can help you to teach that student more effectively.
Lastly, establish a climate of mutual respect. Strive to start class on time, avoid cancelling class, and fill classtime with meaningful activities; this shows students that their time matters to you. Allow and encourage all students to participate, and acknRZOHGJH VWXGHQW ¶V

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LGHD E\ VD\LQJ WKDW«´ 0DU]DQR 0DU]DQR 0DNH H\H FRQWDFW with each student so that they know that you are aware of their presence and are expecting them to contirbute. Give each student an opportunity to feel successful in each class session, and be sure to call on students who do not commonly participate. Also, help students to avoid failure or embarrassment in front of their peers -nothing shuts down learning faster.

Conclusion
Based on the vignettes from our teaching experiences mentioned above, we have identified four major ideas about how to adopt a more student-centered approach: planning lessons that encourage student interest; adapting the curricXOXP WR PHHW VWXGHQW ¶V QHHGV XVLQJ technology in the classroom; and developing mutually respectful relationships. While we treated each topic under a separate heading, the reader may have noticed that the research and practical suggestions were quite similar throughout the article. In truth, establishing a studentcentered approach does not rely solely on the implementation of one new

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building the entire curriculum and educational situation around them.
The many interrelated ideas presented in this article will each bring educators one step closer to meaningful student-centered pedagogy.
Ultimately, though, the successful implementation of this new style of education will depend on each individual educator and their individual students. It will be an on-going process of negotiation and learning for each party, and its ultimate goal will be increased student learning. We wish you luck and success as you begin your journey towards this very worthy goal.