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The study started from a general question on why some pupils are moved to act meaningfully for the sake of themselves or/and others while some others are not. Analytically, as a further attempt to find an alternative amidst the inadequacies of conventional motivational theories, one of the available answers to the question is that pupils human agency plays an adamant role in the emergence of compellingness, as it is related to worthwhileness in learning (Alexander, 2005). Emphasizing the existential potentials of human beings to act, change, and transform themselves, human agency is seen potentially emerging when there is a sufficient room for self-determination, self-expression, and self-evaluation in the curriculum, as it is the headwind of what, why and how learning activities are carried out. The author then analyzed a curriculum being used in Indonesia, the 2013 Islamic Studies Curriculum for Primary Five. Using the content analysis method, the study specifically questioned the positioning of pupils in the curriculum; whether they are the active agents of their learning where there is a sufficient room for the development of their human agency or conversely, they are just the passive recipients. To contextualize and obtain a more thorough picture of the analysis, using the same question, the author analyzed relevant policy documents as well as their rendition in the official teacher book and textbook. It was found that the policy documents, the curriculum, and the books tend to position learners not as the agents of their learning, yet more as passive recipients of what is predetermined for them. Analytically, such positioning has great potential to make learning less compelling for pupils as they are conditioned to learn more for achieving standards set by others and are checked through high-stake tests. In the case of the curriculum and textbook for Islamic Studies for fifth graders, specifically, learners are to learn religious ideals and ritual practices, yet are analytically poorly prepared for learning in real-world settings. On the other word, learners are excessively exposed to discursive knowledge of the idealized and imagined world, while they are neither facilitated to reflect and reconstruct what they learn personally or collectively nor to transform themselves existentially (Alexander, 2005; Archer, 2005). As further study is needed to discover the nature of the curricula of other subjects, research on real school teaching and learning practices in terms of human agency in Indonesia seemed to be a must. Crucially, if reliable and critical research on the design and implementation of these practices is not undertaken, the child-centered paradigm will be just a rhetorical discourse. |
