When I thought I was that close to achieve my dream, I realised that it wasn’t that easy. No shortcuts to achieve a dream.

YPMA

If you have followed my blog, maybe you noticed that I have mentioned about Yayasan Pengembangan Media Anak (Children’s Media Development Foundation, YPMA). YPMA is an NGO that works in the field of developing media literacy for children. In the past, they have worked with UNICEF to hold workshop for parents, school teachers and students about media education and media literacy. They produced handbooks and magazines for parents and children called Kidia regularly during that time.

A while before I quit my job as a kindergarten teacher two years ago, I discovered about YPMA through YPMA founder’s paper on academia. I contacted him and he invited me over to YPMA office and he explained the activities that they did. I was actually surprised that what I wanted to pursue about media literacy in Indonesia, they have done it since 2011. At that time, I have been admitted to study at UCL already.

So, I decided to volunteer at YPMA. The main reason is that I was interested in children and media education, and YPMA is all about it. For a year and a half, before going to the UK for my master’s, I made the most of my time to contribute as much as I could in YPMA activities.

Exciting experiences

YPMA didn’t got many activities that year, but I got some “exclusive” access to attend classes and events that only special guests could attend. For example, I attended a focus group discussion for Children’s Television Programme Award (similar to British Academy Children’s Award) by Komisi Penyiaran Indonesia (Indonesian Broadcasting Commission, KPI) twice in 2018 and 2019, attended by NGOs as well as ministry officers. I got to learn the behind the scene of the awards, like how KPI decides the category for the awards, what aspects should be considered in determining the programs, what could be improved from last year’s.

I was also introduced to other founders of YPMA who are lecturers at University of Indonesia, and got the opportunity to be involved in some of their on-going research. I assisted in making research proposal, interviewing participants of the research, and disseminating the result by workshop. Through YPMA, I could participate as presenters in conferences as well (see my post on SECRET).

Along the way, I became more motivated to implement media education into national curriculum, particularly in early years education. So it’s like combining what I am interested in (media education) and what I have experienced in practice (teaching children). Well, one can dream big for sure 😅

For several times I discussed with YPMA director about my vision, my interests in media literacy, and also plans after graduating.

Rock-bottom

There were two moments during that time that made me feel like I was about to give up.

When I discussed that I wanted to try and somehow integrate media education into national curriculum, YPMA director clearly stated to me that it wasn’t possible. I was a bit heart broken at that time. I understand that he spoke from experience. YPMA have tried to appeal to the Ministry of Education and Culture since long time ago about having media education as a subject or implement it in national curriculum. However, they haven’t got any responses from the ministry.

Second one is, when I talked to one of the lecturer who also the co-founder of YPMA. I told her about my interest in applying media education in early years education. She said to me that it was a challenging task, and she’d rather not doing that because when we were dealing with young children, we had to think about their psychological development as well, which is not in her field. I was quite disappointed…at myself because I wasn’t considering what she said about the psychology field.

Even though I was sad and disappointed and my dreams seem to be impossible to be achieved, I recovered soon. Maybe because I was more excited to the fact that I was going to continue my study. It felt like the first step to prove whether I could achieve my dream or not is to continue my study at a higher level. In fact, after being said about that, I became more motivated to learn more about media education and media literacy in the country where media education is far more ahead than mine.

Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.

Wayne Dyer

Yes. I choose to motivate myself 🙂

Changing direction?

Now, halfway done through my master’s study, my point of views have changed a lot. I understand it is not as easy as falling off a log to apply media education in schools or to implement it for young children education. Actually, I have built another interest along my postgraduate journey. Even though I didn’t stick to my original plan, I didn’t feel demotivated at all. In fact, I became more driven because I was exposed to many ways of conducting media education, not only through formal education.

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By the way, at the beginning of this year the new Minister of Education and Culture in Indonesia announced a collaboration with Netflix. The collaboration is hoped to foster creative Indonesians to develop their skills in scriptwriting and filmmaking.

With this recent change, I hope that this will provide an opportunity for educating Indonesian citizens about the media. We’ll see!