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Indonesian Teachers Conference

A two-day workshop was recently held at St Finbarr’s Catholic School in Byron Bay organised by the Catholic Education Office of Lismore with the help of John Bourke and Indonesian teacher Adi Witono Waluyo. Visiting the workshop was Radha Koch from Australia Indonesia Arts Alliance based in Byron Bay, who talked to John about the project

The Dioses of Lismore spreads from Tweed Heads to Port Macquarie and in that Diosis there are about 30 primary schools. Ten of the schools are teaching Indonesian to some of their students, so John brings the teachers together twice a year and helps them with their Indonesian language and cultural ideas in the classroom.

Some of the teachers are absolute beginners and are taken through the fundamentals of the Bahasa Indonesian language, then they come back and learn a little bit more each time. The programme is structured over twelve modules and there are four modules in each of the two-day workshops. The teachers then teach the language to children from ages of kindergarten to grade 6. In the conference workshop the focus is mostly on language, but cultural activities are also incorporated. Today, at St Finbarr’s, the participants are going to learn the gamelan, Javanese dancing and some modern versions of Indonesian dance.

Visiting Indonesian teacher Adi Witono Waluyo normally teaches at the Australia Indonesian Language Foundation in Denpasar but originally comes from Java. He has been teaching at the Foundation for 3 years and has been studying dancing since he was five, so dance is one of his speciality areas as well as language. John and fellow teachers from Macksville High School and Evans River were able to bring Adi to Australia to work with their students through receiving a grant from the Australian Indonesian Institute in Canberra. They also each contributed a certain amount of money, which has enabled Adi Witono Waluyo to be here for 6 months. He will work at Macksville High School, Evans River, Bellingen and some of the primary schools in the Lismore area. Later Adi will also travel to some of the Catholic schools in Armidale. It’s a very exciting project and the focus is on the whole culture of Indonesia which is John’s passion.

Most students on the North Coast don’t have a lot of contact with other cultures and John believes that the we should be making our students culturally aware and literate. Indonesia being our closest neighbour it’s the obvious place to start and the Indonesian language is not that difficult for the students according to John and he tries to make it enjoyable and something that the students might want to follow up in the future.

John is based in Grafton and works with the Lismore Catholic Office. He spent two periods of time studying in Indonesian and then went on to Armidale University to study for a further three years. He is very committed to Indonesian culture and loves to teach it to other teachers knowing that it is highly appreciated throughout the North Coast region.

Adi at Balinese Extravaganza