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ducation expert Maya Soetoro-Ng slipped in full Indonesian sentences here and there in her talk last week at the American Cultural Center @america in Jakarta.

She resorted to English to explain more sophisticated concepts and references, and apologized for her Indonesian skills, saying it was more or less limited to “bahasa tepi jalan” (street language) or the language one uses to order food at a warung.

And although Indonesians usually applaud even the most novice speakers of their language, it would be safe to say that Soetoro, who was born in Jakarta and stayed in the archipelago until she was 11, was being humble.

She managed to describe partly in Indonesian, for instance, an incident in which the cupboard in her home in Hawaii fell apart along with the dishes it contained, leaving only a cup that was “sehat” (healthy), before jokingly excusing herself for the inappropriate adjective, saying “you can have a sehat cangkir [healthy cup], can’t you?”

According to Soetoro, the Indonesian language is one of the things that connects her to her half brother, whose Indonesian sentence saying how much he liked local food two years ago, “bakso… nasi goreng semua enak”, became a catchphrase of the nation for some time.

She referred to him casually as “Si Barack Obama” (Si is a casual reference for friends) when describing how big her family was, and said the incumbent US President would be getting her help during the summer and fall in his campaign for reelection.

Soetoro is nine years Obama’s junior, and they share Ann Dunham as their mother. Soetoro’s father is Lolo Soetoro, from whom she inherited her Indonesian blood.

During her talk in Jakarta, however, she emphasized that she was not sent by her brother nor the US administration, and that her recent visit to the archipelago dealt mostly with education — a subject she has been passionate about since she was 18 years old and worked with after school programs for middle school students.

“I felt that [teaching] was a wonderful opportunity to keep learning but I also love the relationship. Still, young people make me feel so happy. There is a sense of thinking about what is possible. There is
always hopefulness in my profession,” Soetoro said.

She is currently an adjunct education fellow at the East-West Center and assistant professor of education at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

The cupboard story was one of the illustrations Soetoro used to describe her dissatisfaction regarding the state education is currently in. According to her, she became very upset during the incident because the cupboard contained dining sets from the many women in her family.

However, she realized almost instantly that her daughter, who was four years old then, had refrained from the habit of pretending she was “cleaning the dishes” that night because of an illness. Had the child been healthy, she would have been right under that cupboard.

“I realized I didn’t really need those dishes. I didn’t really need the teacups or the pots to remember my mother or my grandmother … In an instant, I didn’t care about the thing and I realized I still had memory. I still had the shape of my mother’s love and the feel of her embrace. I still had the lessons that she gave me,” she said.

The feeling reflected her idea about the current state of some education systems, which, she said, have yet to pay “attention to the things that matter” or to succeed in “dissolving borders”.

“When I think about education I think about it still so often learning about pedagogy and the curriculum that is fixed … We think about what makes a successful student, which is often through multiple choice tests,” Soetoro said.

During the talk, she shared several teaching methods that, according to her, might help dissolve the borders between classroom and the real world and provide new perspectives.

One example is the method of analyzing newspapers from around the world to expand students’ knowledge and to make them relate better to events by writing personal letters to the figures whose pictures grace the pages.

The same method is applied to studying major events in history, such as World War II. Soetoro said she asked students to build “bridges” of empathy for the people affected by those events.

“In World War II, I had the students understand multiple points of view... They look at something like the holocaust from the point of view of a parent. From the point of view of a soldier, a German soldier, from the point of view of a Jewish doctor,” she said.

They can even imagine their own scenarios to replace the historical event instead of resorting to a sense of inevitability, she added.

“The other things I have them do is to take something like the US bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that was one of the outcomes of WW II. But was that inevitable? So I have them change the story. Or the dropping of Agent Orange during Vietnam … What was other ways to have handled this? So they do conflict transformation with the people in the past. Pretending they are there ... How do they, knowing what they know perhaps, change the outcome of history?” Soetoro said.

Other methods she champions include collaboration, presenting each other’s ideas and doing a “so what” session after a lesson to help students understand the importance of the things they have learned. At one point, she pointed out that activities such as listening to others and discussions are ones that are in line with the “Indonesian spirit”.

“Schools should be places that cultivate innovation and lead to lifelong learning and morale as well as artistic courage beyond the classroom. There are ways of doing this that allow for the teaching of required content of course; for instance, schools can encourage community service projects in theology, math that looks at anti-poverty alleviation,” Soetoro said in an email to The Jakarta Post.

She emphasized the importance of effective communication, since, according to her, “global competence is about learning to communicate with each other and global competition will be aided by learning to communicate better.”

Another subject in the US Soetoro considers in need of upgrading is multicultural education.

“People in multicultural education classes very often they just learn about traditional costumes or about the traditional food but they don’t pay attention to the fact that cultures change … and one of the main reasons they change is because of intersection … it’s about our connection, our communication. It’s about our hybrid identities when we are impacted, affected by loving people from another culture, by knowing intimately people from another country,” she said.

Soetoro might be quite an expert on the matter, as she has experienced coming in contact with people, including her own family members, from different cultures since she was very young, and also witnessed how her anthropologist mother engaged with different communities and made herself at home in many places.

Her mother, who taught her until the age of 11, had the habit of dragging her out of bed early in the morning to look at the moon.

“She said she loved the moon because the moon was everywhere the same ... and no matter where she went she knew that the moon that she saw was the same moon … And the people she loves would be connected through that vision,” the dark-haired woman recalled.

As for her father, she remembered Lolo as “a good and gentle man” despite not having the chance to spend much time with him.

“He loved spicy food and time with friends. He was affable and lovable. He gave me the gift of life and Indonesia and I am so grateful,” Soetoro said.

She tries to keep her two daughters connected to her birthplace through having pictures of Indonesia in their house and having Indonesian food once a week.

And of course there’s the language. Soetoro said she would whisper words such as “bobo, sayang, bangun sehat, kuat gembira” (Sleep, my dear, and wake up healthy, strong and happy) to her children every night in bed.

“They don’t understand anything but I know that they feel it … and they would associate these words, these rhythms with something that is home,” she said.