Dana Kristiawan

• English lecturer, Universitas 17 Agustus 1945 Banyuwangi
• English Teacher for Indonesian Prisons, Peace Generation NGO

In the Indonesian education system, from kindergarten to university level, there is no program or educational services that explicitly develops values of peace. In my work, I focus on empowering Islamic teachers to be peace leaders through developing English language materials related to Peace Education. I have been implementing workshops for 24 Islamic schools in Banyuwangi city. The workshops focus on assisting the Islamic teachers to create English material which promote peace education for Muslim students. A key challenge emerging from the workshops was the difficulty in encouraging leadership in staff in terms of drawing on the skills developed during workshops and developing their own materials, and in supporting others to develop their own materials within a peace education framework.

I am involved in the peace action movement as a researcher, lecturer, and peace activist. As a researcher, I am creating a framework that can be used as a guideline for Islamic teachers to create locally grounded materials for promoting peace through learning English. As a lecturer in my home country, Indonesia, I was concerned about teachers in p re-service practice and their access to role models in order to develop peace materials both for public and religious schools. In my role as a peace activist, I joined the NGO PeaceGeneration which aims at supporting reconciliation among religious groups.

English/TESOL teachers in Indonesia are not really aware of integrating peace education in the English Language material. My work is related to supporting Islamic teachers to integrate locally inspired Peace Education values into English teaching with multimodal materials. It is important to draw upon local Islamic values as a bridge for students and teachers between the local context and the curriculum enabling them to actively engage with peace values and related language skills. These processes of integration are always striking for me.