“Competency” is often bandied about as a pedagogic construct since the introduction of the competency-based curriculum in the academic landscape in 2004 to 2005. This construct has been continuously expanded and used as a guiding principle in the curriculum’s design.

A case in point is the so-called standard competency, which comprises four competencies: pedagogy, personal, professional and social. These standard competencies, as has been stipulated in Government Regulation No. 19/2005, need to be possessed by an educator as the agent of learning.

More recently, the construct is used in a rather vacuous sense, as in the initial competency test (uji kompetensi awal) — a recent move by the Education Ministry to screen teachers nation-wide so that they are eligible to take part in the government-sponsored certification program this year.

As mandated by the Teacher Law No. 14/2005, all teachers, as well as lectures nation-wide, are subject to take part in the certification program in order to obtain a teaching certification.

Compared with the previous year’s programs, there is quite a radical shift in this year’s policy regarding how the teacher certification program should be conducted.

 In the previous years, starting from 2007, the program was executed in the form of a portfolio assessment, which requires teachers to self-collect any documents relevant to their careers as teachers.

These documents were assessed, by two independent assessors, in terms of their relevance to teachers’ academic qualification, teaching experience and training, academic achievement and professional development and organizational experiences, to mention just a few.

This year’s program requires no portfolio submissions to be assessed. Instead, would-be certified teachers are obliged to the education and training of teaching professions (known as the PLPG), the absolute requite of which is for teachers to take and pass the contentious initial competency test.

As the previous year’s program was deemed inefficient, unsuccessful in boosting teachers’ qualifications and replete with fraud and other unethical conduct, this year’s program is seen by educational analysts as a corrective to the old mechanism.

The relevant question to be raised now is, if the new mechanism being applied this year indeed provides a corrective, whether this corrective offers a panacea that helps solve, if not minimize, the problems faced by everyone previously involved in the program.

Reading the testimonies of participating teachers who expressed laments and dismay after taking part in the competency test (see Kompas, Feb. 27), we can infer that the new policy creates more problems than it solves because it is conceptually flawed and, in practice, unethical.

For one thing, what constitutes the notion of competency in the competency test is not well-defined. Thus, to test a teachers’ competency is tantamount to testing something that is not well-defined. One can therefore cast serious doubt over the result of such a test, which measures only a cognitive aspect at the expense of other important aspects.

That competency screening via a test is assumed to make teachers prepared, and hence poised, to enroll in the PLPG would be a gross fallacy. In essence, passing the competency test is by no means a real cause that results in a teachers’ preparedness in the PLPG.

Likewise, being failed in the test is not a causative factor that renders a teacher poorly prepared or incompetent in joining the training.

If we succumb to such an assumption, we are likely to be enmeshed in a cause-effect fallacy. There seems to be no cause-effect relationship between the scores a teacher obtains in the test and the readiness to enroll in the PLPG.

For another, as a consequence of this conceptual flaw, insisting that the competency test be executed as a sole requirement of teachers’ enrolment in the PLPG is, in practice, unethical and hence undesirable.

A formal, officially recognized test such as this and tests like the national exam are always discriminatory by nature because they are related to a power relationship between the tested and the testers.

Those who hold more power, the testers, can one-sidedly impose their interests and beliefs through test instruments on those having no power, the tested, with the latter often being intellectually marginalized and sidelined.

Like other professions such as lawyers, doctors and translators, the teaching profession needs certification and no one would rebut the importance of certification. However, the mechanism of how the certification program is conducted can certainly be disputed, provided that they do teachers a disservice.

Despite its inherent shortcomings, such as the difficulty in training a massive number of teachers within a certain period of time, the PLPG is indeed a good idea.

With the assistance of highly professional trainers, this training program can be of great help in facilitating teachers in their bid toward knowledge advancement and professional development.

In fact, through intensive interaction with trainers and colleagues, teachers’ real competencies – competencies not only in specific skills and knowledge needed for performing real life tasks in the classroom contexts but also in personal, professional and social development — can be tangibly and continually assessed.

Thus, rather than formally testing their competencies using a traditional paper-and-pencil-based test, continually assessing teachers by assigning them real-life and relevant tasks during training sessions in the PLPG would be far more humane and ethical.

The writer is an associate professor at Atma Jaya Catholic University. He is also chief editor of Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching.

Popular

Growing discontent with policymaking keeps students on streets

Protest works

US disputes Iranian claims about closing Strait of Hormuz