Susiawan Susiawan

Susiawan, a native of Solo (central Java), has been developing an educational alternative that encourages children, especially poor children, to speak up and take initiatives, to create their own teams, to understand their human and natural environment, to be broadly creative.

Over the last decade he has developed and refined his approach in a slum community of Bandung. Gradually he and those he's attracted to his work have opened three other centers in Bandung, one serving a rural community in south Sumatera, and (for two years) one in Solo. Although he's still evolving the approach, he now is ready and wants to begin spreading it across Indonesia.
Entering children in their first year come only half a day each Sunday. In the second and third years this increases to the half day they're not in the formal school every day. Although he includes younger children most of his students are 10 to 15.
As the children gradually gravitate into this very different world, he leads them through carefully considered stages of personal awakening and growth.
After introducing them to the philosophy, he helps the students undo the way they've learned to learn and interact at home and in the schools. They're encouraged to take up their own ideas and take care of their own needs (commonly done by an adult or older sibling at home). There's a great deal of group activity, be it in making puppets and creating and producing a play with them or in painting or in discussion -- but, the ability to become a part of a team these collaborations help build is different from the top down teamwork required in the schools: here both the group's objectives and its internal workings are the children's. By the second three months a child is in the group, he or she is increasingly encouraged to speak up, to take personal initiatives. By their sixth month they're starting to teach/help younger children in the same spirit. By the final quarter of their first year they're firmly engaged in a new community, building new initiative and self-confidence, and having fun.
In the second year, as the children begin to spend more of their week at their center, Susiawan draws them into explorations and discussions of the environment around them. Why is their skin likely to itch after swimming in the nearby stream? What are they learning in their formal school and why? What is the economic condition of their parents -- and how will it affect their education and longer term futures? What have the experiences of drop-outs they know been? These explorations revolve heavily around field visits, simple experiments, and group discussions. Increasingly, Susiawan's youngsters have a sense of who they are and how the world around them is put together -- and therefore are proportionately able to make their own decisions.
Increasingly, in the second and throughout the third year, the program encourages creativity. The children write their own poetry free of a format. The two and three dimensional art they've learned to create from the first year becomes more and more a medium of personal and group expression. The center provides old tires, ropes, bamboo, etc., and challenges the students to make what they imagine. They also make their own puppets and masks and develop their own characters, stories, and plays.
As these last examples suggest, the several arts and writing (along with social exploration) are the core of the subject matter curriculum. Susiawan, himself a Bandung Institute of Technology-trained graphic artist, feels the arts are a natural medium to engage and help children find free expression and through it their independence.
Susiawan's work is thoughtful in detail as well as broad design. Thus, for example, he teaches only vocabulary that connects with the students. Children of a Bandung slum have little or no experience with farm animals or equipment; consequently, he postpones most such words. (And vice versa for rural children.) This concern has forced him to develop his own materials, using among other things local newspaper articles.
Susiawan's next major objective is to open a training center for facilitators (teachers) that initially would launch 150 people a year. In addition to helping build more of his group's own centers, he hopes to attract staff from voluntary organizations, teachers, and others who can help spread his ideas. This center would also push him to further develop and articulate his approach. Later on, once he feels his approach is more fully refined, he plans to publish extensive materials both to encourage many more independent centers to open and to encourage change in Indonesia's existing schools.

Development and, in the broad sense of the word, independence probably depend critically on a people's learning both to be independent, self-confident beings and how to create and work together in a great many different teams (be they voluntary non-profits, businesses, parties, or neighborhood associations.) Nations, communities, and individuals are all at a great disadvantage in the modern world to the degree they have not learned the highly sophisticated skills of both independence and cooperation. Relative incompetence in these areas often largely defines the boundaries of poverty.
This seems obvious. After all, didn't the British say: "The future of Empire is built on the playing fields of Eton"? The same recognition that extensive early training in these skills is critical more recently played a major role in the U.S. women's movement's insistence that girls be given fully equal access to competitive team athletics in U.S. schools.
Yet, this insight has not been a central thrust in development literature -- let alone in the design of most Indonesian and other Asian schools. These schools are far more likely to reflect the hierarchical, rule and authority dependent nature of the traditional societies in which they (and their teachers and parents) are rooted. This is probably especially true for Indonesia that has gone from mass illiteracy to universal primary education in only 20 years. It is also a country with an exceptionally deep and strong traditional culture.
Susiawan's timing looks excellent. Over the coming decade Indonesia will probably turn a growing proportion of its now stretched educational attention to making its increasingly established schools more effective. His ability to succeed with the children of the poor, both rural and urban, further enhances his possible impact.

Susiawan grew up in Solo, the son of a retired soldier and a mother who worked as a batik artist. Very able, he went to the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) in 1976, a time of exceptional student awareness and activity. He began working on his vision of a different way of helping children grow that would work for poor children by founding his initial center in one of Bandung's slum neighborhoods as a student and drawing others in as also volunteer colleagues.
After graduation he's supported himself (and a part of the center) by working roughly five hours a day as a freelance graphic artist, chiefly designing brochures and advertisements for business. He stuck with his dream and kept developing his approach and gradually expanding the work to four different neighborhoods in Bandung and beyond. In 1986 he completed a doctorate at ITB with a thesis on the uses of culture in children's education.
He's now ready to have a broader impact (see above) and his election to the fellowship will allow him to do this work full time.
"Susiawan's youngsters have a sense of who they are and how the world around them is put together..."