Search

This paper describes how teachers in Indonesia have implemented the Character Education policy. This policy required teachers to instil certain values in every lesson. Drawing on Durkheim's (1925) distinction between secular and religious morality, this paper considers how state schools promoted this 'rational/secular moral education', and how it interacted with religious moral education. Bernstein's concepts of pedagogic discourse, instructional and regulative discourses were adopted to analyse how teachers have re-contextualised this policy in the micro pedagogic settings. Three types of data were collected for this study: interviews, class observations and teachers' lesson plans. Four EFL teachers were interviewed on two occasions and three classes were observed for each teacher. Since character education was issued within the school-based curriculum that offered schools and teachers more choices to develop the local curriculum and its intent, the analysis focused on what moral premises were evident in their school and classes, and how such morality was transmitted through the EFL lessons. The conclusion suggests that teachers' implementation of moral education in their classes was dominated by their school communities' and the teachers' own preferred value of religiosity. Such values played out in the classes through both the regulative discourse and the instructional discourse.