In most rural areas in Indonesia, a reading culture has still yet to be fully adopted by students. However, at SDN 173 Tanjung Benanak in Tanjung Jabung Barat, Jambi, things are different.

Although the school is located in an oil palm plantation area, students there have excellent literacy skills and high reading interest.

Among them is Mayla Arista Widya, a sixth grade student at the school. Mayla reads at least eight fiction works a month, including novels and graphic novels. In addition, she also consumes textbooks.

The students’ literacy skills are not just limited to reading, as Mayla and her friends are also capable of writing reports and creating posters, a remarkable achievement for students of their grade level.

However, this feat was not achieved overnight. Mutia Lafrida, Head of SDN 173 Tanjung Benanak, said that it took about three years to improve the students’ literacy skills – a mission which began in 2012.

“Initially, we received training and guidance from Tanoto Foundation in helping our kids to learn how to enjoy reading books. I saw progress after three years. Then, when the Ministry of Education and Culture launched the national daily 15-minute book reading activity, our students became used to reading,” Mutia said.

After increasing the students’ reading interest, Mutia began focusing on training them to actually understand the contents of the books, by using fun methods.

One example is a dice game, which gets the students to throw a die after reading their books. Depending on the dice roll, students have to answer one of six questions (what, who, where, when, why and how) based on the book they have just read.

Questions have to be answered either by the student throwing the dice itself, or by a student appointed by the dice thrower.

To further enrich the reading experience, Mutia has introduced a rolling book system at the school. Under the system, each student is required to have one story book at all times. When the students have finished their books, they then pass them on to their classmates.

The system works in the way that if a class comprises 28 students, then each student will have finished 28 books before the class passes, or ‘rolls’ the books to another class.

Tanoto Foundation’s PINTAR program continues its efforts to support the Indonesian government by raising literacy skills among schools in the country, through focusing on building good learning practices and improving school management and leadership.

Megawati Wijaya’s choice to study and work in industrial Korea is a calculated one. The former Tanoto Scholar has a strong aspiration to take the knowledge she gains in Korea back to Indonesia, and achieve her dream of developing a technology startup in her home country.

Megawati currently works as a software engineer at AKA Intelligence, an artificial intelligence and robotics developer based in Seoul, South Korea. Her main responsibility is to develop artificial intelligence software which will be applied in both daily and industrial activities.

Technology has always been a strong area of interest for the 28-year-old since her childhood days. It was the reason behind the choice to study Computer Science at the University of Indonesia, from which she graduated in 2012.

However, unsatisfied with an undergraduate degree, Megawati went on to take a Master’s at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

“I chose to study in Korea because of the rapid technological development in this country. I hope I can learn as much as I can from here and someday be able to apply my skills and knowledge in Indonesia,” she said.

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Megawati shared that there are a few advantages to studying in Korea over Indonesia.

“Students in Korea are encouraged to undertake research by acquiring government funding, whereas in Indonesia, students pretty much prepare to enter the workforce,” she explained.

“So as postgraduate students, we were required to enter labs here to work on research projects under the guidance of a professor. Plus, it was unique in that we were even paid for the research work,” Megawati added.

However, Megawati notes that the language barrier did pose a challenge during her studies.

“Korean is predominantly used in daily life and the office, so we were definitely required to learn the language,” she shared.

To improve her language skills, Megawati took up Korean language courses at Keimyung University.

Her diligent efforts have paid off as she now has a stable career in the Land of the Morning Calm.

However, Megawati intends to return to Indonesia as soon as she feels that her knowledge and skills are enough to establish a robotics-related startup there.

With it, she hopes to be able to contribute to her country in certain fields, including education by facilitating more effective foreign language learning for Indonesians.

In 2018 36.22 per cent of elementary schools in Indonesia did not have libraries, according to the Ministry of Education and Culture.

That was the case until recently at SDN 173 / V Tanjung Benanak in Tanjung Jabung Barat Regency, Jambi, which went 14 years without a dedicated library.

“We just didn’t think about the need for a school library, with our limited classrooms and absence of reading materials,” said Kartika Isnaini, a teacher at the school.

All that changed in 2011, when Tanoto Foundation visited the school as part of a reading campaign. After getting a taste of what was possible, the teachers were inspired to do more.

Faced with a limited budget, the principal and teachers brainstormed ideas to get new books for the school.

They began by meeting the local village head, who agreed to loan books from the village library to the school for a semester at a time.

The school set aside four per cent of its budget to buy books, and also encouraged alumni and parents to donate.

As a result of this hard work the school received around 400 books each semester, giving students ample reading choices and beginning to instill a love of literature among the pupils.

Books were distributed in classrooms, but the problem was that there was still no dedicated home for them. The teachers decided to transform a disused bathroom into a library but, at just 2×3 metres, space was extremely limited.

“The library was a small room, but it was successful in initiating reading culture among the students,” Kartika shared.

Hearing about the hard work the school had undertaken to improve reading among students, Tanoto Foundation offered to help by constructing a new, fully-furnished 36 meter square library for the school, and equipping it with books.

Kartika now makes it a point for her classes to visit the library twice a week, so that students are constantly exposed to literature.

The school also encourages students to understand what they are reading, through book reviews, story retelling sessions or drawing the book characters on posters, she said.

Third-grade students are also asked to create their own storybooks as school projects, with guidance from the teachers. Books created in this way are stored in either the classroom reading corner, or in the school library.

“It turns out that the students’ books also attract other students to read them,” Kartika said.

A daily reading campaign was also launched at the school in 2014, which was further bolstered by the 15-minute national reading policy announced by the Ministry of Education and Culture.

The teachers’ efforts and the new school library have helped improve the children’s literacy skills, with the students’ reading journals showing that they read about two to three books a week.