Case-Based Value Learning for Religious Education

By Rohmat Mulyana

Abstract

A Challenging issue for teaching religion at public schools and madrasas in Indonesia concerns with the way teachers introduce students to relative values. Teaching religion as a subject matter, therefore, should extent the horizon of student’s views to rich different areas of life, ensure the sphere of religious studies as knowledge of reality, and promote deep comprehension toward any social and multicultural issues. Technically, inductive thinking and descriptive value judgment needs to be developed in such a teaching. This paper tries to elaborate some challenging issues for teaching religion in Indonesia and to present a basic construct of case-based value learning that consists of five steps namely: narration of case, identification of value, literacy of norm, affixation of consciousness, and internalization of value. This construct offers a narrative and descriptive approach for meaningful affective development through teaching religion.

1. Introduction

Indonesia is a country where many people live with their uniqueness of race, ethnic, culture, and religion. Various life styles are commonly performed in different regions of the country. People in every region can perform their own language, custom, ritual, artifact, and belief in accordance with their properties. All the diversities are ensured by legal constitution and supported by the so-called national motto “unity in diversity”.

In such diversity, education as a sub-system of culture cannot be developed through single perspective of certain community. One community cannot cope and monopolize others, even though the community constitutes a major race, ethnic, culture or religion. Related to this, the most important issue is not laid down on superiority of one citizen to others, but on how to create a multicultural understanding and mutual respect among them. People should understand the right of citizen by which the differences of way of life take them for granted. And, they also must know that natural distinctiveness is not only because they are socially constructed by human beings but also naturally created by God.

Using this view, the national education in Indonesia developed a basic principle for religious education that touches parts of universal as well as particular values. Universal values promote learners within broad-mindedness principle and mutual understanding among religion believers to enhance peace and harmony among religious communities. Teaching those values are often performed in classroom activity by both religion and civics teachers. Particular values reflect the existence of religious education conducted through a single subject matter of religion in each community of belief like Islamic Education, Christianity Education, and Buddhism Education. The policy of teaching-learning process of religion has been taken for very long time. Since students attend Kindergarten, some basic religious teachings are introduced to them. Hence, they are formally taught religion when they study at elementary school, secondary school, and university.

Should a student of a public school learns religion about 90 minutes a week, he will have studied his religion in classroom formally for at least 864 hours by the time he finishes his senior secondary school. In addition, he also gets some religious teaching and training from several extracurricular activities conducted by school. Meanwhile, madrasah, as Islamic educational institution, introduces Islamic teaching more than public school does. There are five Islamic subjects which are separately taught in madrasah i.e. Islamic Theology, the Koran Interpretation and Prophet Traditions, Islamic Jurisprudence, The History of Islamic Culture, Islamic Ethic, and Arabic Language. Each subject matter is conveyed for 90 minutes classroom meeting in a week. So, it can be said that a student of madrasah learns about Islamic teaching in classroom for 4.320 hours in a year.

What is the effect of this learning duration? There is a tendency that student of madrasah is more knowledgeable on religion than that of public school. As a result, there are more students from madrasah who succeed to follow higher education in Islamic university than those who are from public education. Does it mean that students of madrasah are getting more pious than students of public school? In some case, the differences of their commitment on Islamic conduct are not easy to compare. The piousness seems to be deeper than intellectual dissonance in which its direct connection to behavior needs to be proved through empirical evidence.

It is the case that some people say that madrasah is more successful to guide students to be pious. They have such notion because they see some phenomena of misbehavior that seldom appears among the students of madrasah rather than among the students of public school. It may be correct since they never ask further questions such as: Have the students of madrasah been more broad-minded to look the differences of culture and religion of others? Can they deploy their attitude of tolerance to religious diversity? Have they applied Islamic teaching as a means of problem solving for contextual issue? The answer of these questions, I think, may not be as simple as we think, for example, by explaining the characteristic of knowledgeable learners in their religion. The cohesiveness and homogeneity of madrasah climate as particular religious community can be a potential aspect to influence students for being more exclusive, narrow-minded or normative learning oriented. Here, the role of teachers in creating more conducive classroom interaction and good school climate that makes students elaborate universal values of interfaith understanding and the relative values of social context places as a significant aspect of value transformation.

Unlike madrasahs, public schools promote religion diversity. The public schools students study many different subjects in heterogeneous religion believers that enable them to be more accustomed to keeping in touch with other religion believers. Some Indonesian educationists, therefore, assume that students of public schools can be more open-minded in respecting different religions. Such assumption is virtually easy to understand since the aspect of social interaction involves mutual admiration among different believers. But, we actually still have a crucial question to ask: How good their students do understand Islamic teaching and think it critically and conduct it in reality? This question is important to explain the causes of juvenile delinquency frequently performed by some public school students. For this reason, a deep and contextual comprehension on Islamic teaching needs to be improved and teachers should extent the two hours teaching on religion effectively by deploying more effective teaching techniques.

Regarding these problems, the teaching-learning process of the religion of Islam as a subject matter in schools and madrasahs needs a breakthrough. In a very specific approach, a breakthrough for learning Islam concerns with modification of classroom interaction such as modifying imperative to descriptive, normative to creative, deductive to inductive, and memorization to comprehension. Related to this, classroom interaction should be made as such to enable students to broaden their ability of understanding real life issues and to engage them in making value judgment. It is, of course, a challenging effort for teachers who often use traditional and monotone techniques such as memorization in teaching Islamic doctrine. The future of the religion of Islam classroom ought to promote a novel learning situation and a meaningful interaction rather than a mere memorization of sacred text. Besides, it is likely that the understanding of religion can be attained through pointing some examples of either positive or negative conduct done by people around us. In line with this, Zohar and Marshal (2000) believe that wrestling the problem of good and evil, problems of life and death can be a way to get full possession of spiritual intelligence.

This essay presents a discussion of how to create model of Islamic teaching that ensure students of senior secondary school to understand behavioral dilemma occurred in social life. Using the topic Case-based value learning; a challenging issue in religious education in Indonesia, this essay tries to present three sides of explanation that concern with: First, the need of descriptive teaching on value in Islamic education subject matter. Second, the possible response and the challenge to the idea of case-based value learning in Islamic education. Third, the construct development of case-based value learning with thorough explanation for each stage.

2. The Need for Descriptive Teaching

One of the weaknesses of teaching religion in senior secondary school in Indonesia is the poorness of systematic exploration to find the meaning. Learning religion was isolated by the wall of classroom, restricted by memorization, and jailed by imperative notion of how religion inheritance be taken for granted. Even the latter problem is not always incorrect, the process of learning religion is claimed to be more capable to balance the effort of tenet exploration and the process of translating it into real life situation.

In a metaphor discourse written by Langgulung (1983), the balance of two sides is understood as a need of equilibrium between “under tip of iceberg” and “upper tip of iceberg”. Under tip of iceberg symbolizes the principles of religion that can be understood by reason such as the thought of human nature according to Islamic philosophy view, the Islamic education theories deeply rooted from Koran and Moslem Prophet Tradition, and some fundamental thoughts on Islamic teaching. According to him, the exploration on this area has significantly appeared and never ended in a procession of innovation (tajdid) on Islamic discourse. Meanwhile, the upper tip of iceberg symbolizes the need of how to enhance religious consciousness through practical and systematic efforts that has not yet been optimally empowered by Moslem community. Islamic education, therefore, is important to ensure that the sphere of religious studies is not cut off from knowledge in contemporary life and not compartmentalized from studies of the humanities and the natural and social discipline. For this reason, the balance exploration on both sides becomes an important issue in creating dynamic classroom interaction.

Lack of balance in Islamic education has also stimulated a European thinker. Thomas (2003), in his essay entitled Excellence in Islamic Education appreciates the charity of Islamic education concept as effort to build a total man, yet in other side he also fairly recognizes that the process of learning tends to sheer rote-learning, repetition, and memorization divorced from understanding and meaning. Such phenomena, according to him, need some improvements for future prospective Islamic education. It is necessary that the process of teaching religion at the present time result in an active interaction through critical thinking, collaborative learning, inquiry learning and reflexion of personal experience.

What was written by both experts actually can be thought of as auto-criticism to the stereotype of nowadays Islamic education that tends to practice monotone strategy with minimum students motivation. Obviously, value is a key term that should be explored explicitly in both general and specific meaning through teaching the religion of Islam. Possessing value is important part of learning. In this regard, the process of teaching the religion of Islam must promote the process of identification, judgment, choice, reflexion, and habituation for religious noble values experienced in social life. A functional Islamic teaching always reflects a high concern toward the important of promoting practical religious moral and value. Conversely, the non-functional Islamic teaching will only create a classroom climate as memorization place devoid of meaning of current social issues.

Some experts of moral and value education offered their work in detail framework for teaching value. A number of moral dilemma stories for improving skill on moral judgment (Kohlberg & Gilligan, 1971; Piaget, 1932) and the techniques of value clarification (Kniker 1997; Rokeach, 1973; Simon, 1972) have been developed with thorough explanation for practical usage. The stories and the techniques virtually provide rich inner construct that value of Islamic teachings can be incorporated in it. For creative and broad-minded teachers of Islamic education, the inner construct of moral and value learning will be precious alternative to enrich their classroom interaction and to create a novel insight of learning religion. The process of Islamic teaching by constructing both positive and negative story of a social event and relating it to the stage of one’s religious consciousness is believed to have been effective in making students feel good impact of Islamic teaching on his life style.

This case-based value learning on Islamic education is important to introduce to teachers and students of public and Islamic senior secondary school because of the following reasons:
Firstly, in today classroom interaction, such a value learning has not been yet implemented seriously in Islamic Education. Most of Islamic education books were written in very normative explanation and in the form of definitive paragraph. Teaching the religion of Islam, in turn, has technically no significant difference from teaching other subject matters (physics, biology, chemistry, economics, geography, etc). Most of the teaching processes of the religion of Islam do not give much knowledge and skills necessary for engaging in meaningful and contextual activities in this life. Bagir (2003), in his essay, claimed that religious education in Indonesia failed because of its weaknesses in improving student’s religiousness.

Secondly, the effort of redesigning national education curriculum has led to the importance of attitude and value toward student’s competence. But, in Competence-Based Curriculum (CBC) – a new educational curriculum in Indonesia – the development of affective domain has not been yet described in a clear explanation and in a practical use for Islamic education. Some explanations of affective development are still in general view of competence that can be ambiguity in understanding the aspect and tend to put the work on teaching the religion of Islam in too broad perspective for teachers. Hence, a specific translation into affective development by constructing case-based value learning will supposedly help the teachers.
Thirdly, there is a need for taking students of public and Islamic senior secondary school to deeply comprehend Islamic teaching. Psychology of Development explains that students at the age of 16-18 are within adolescence and late adolescence psychological phase (Cole & Hall, 1970). In this phase, they search for meanings and select various values that can be their act reference in the future. Teaching universal and particular value therefore can help student to comprehend the principles of Islamic teaching and to judge the impact of value on their life.

3. The Challenge for Case-Based Value Learning

Learning the religion of Islam in Indonesian schools and madrasahs by emphasizing the descriptive, creative, and inductive teaching technique is a challenging work. Some people of Moslem community maybe regard it as unpopular idea. Such perception was found when the writer discusses about this perspective with some people. There is somewhat skepticism among them on the effectiveness of the model to make students more pious. This anxiety especially rises among people who believe that understanding the religion of Islam must only promote the principles of virtue. They refer to the opinion of Imam al-Ghazali that remarks “Do teach a child something good or kindness, because through this he will know why it is important” (Sulaiman, 1964). This principle is often understood as very normative context by some people. Finding the truth for them as if should be taken from the only sacred truth through textual understanding without comparing it with the real life issues. Such perception, of course, has a particular starting point on how to enable make a child to be more pious. Perennialism and textual standpoint come to be the most significant in their way of thinking.

Subsequently, there are people who believe that deep comprehension of the meaning of a religion can be developed by encouraging contextual analysis. For them, knowing good action can be transformed by knowing paired cases of badness. The understanding of the importance of peace, for instance, can be enhanced by explaining the negative effect of war to civil people. Likewise, understanding and realizing some other principles of Islamic tenet are possible to advance by critical analysis toward contradictory actions. The viewpoint lays down its characteristic on the basis of constructivism and the importance of contextual and meaningful analysis. Descriptive value learning actually has large sphere for its development in this viewpoint. Unfortunately, people who advocate this view have not reached any significant improvement for future Islamic education.

Another challenge may emerge from the substance of Islamic teaching. Islam teaches three bedrock dimensions of religious doctrine namely: creed, law, and ethic of Islam (Qurtubi, 1985). The crucial challenge will come up when we apply the framework of contemporary value learning for the substance of creed. Compared with two other dimensions, it is unlikely to be easy to explain the dynamic of creed dimension in clear description. Discussing religion in the context of creed will touch esoteric domain in which the quality of belief in God, angles, holy books, messengers, day of Judgment and predestination will be appropriately known by individual himself. We may, sometimes be able to predict it from behavioral phenomena, but the abstract attribute of creed makes us unsure in which belief those phenomena refer to. Case-based learning value is not for debating the essence of creed. It is a kind of effort to create learning situation in which students are able to deepen what they actually believe in.

Unlike the teaching of creed, the teaching of value within law and ethic of Islam allows teachers and students of senior secondary schools to explore various explicit social issues. For these dimensions, a teacher of Islamic education may lead his students to comprehend deeply the problematic application of law and the phenomena of misbehavior character. For instance, the problem of dualistic law application (positive law and Islamic law) in social contract may become a means of value analysis on Islamic law dimension. Equally, the phenomena of racial conflict, financial corruption, juridical injustice, untidy city, natural disaster, and so on provide rich information for analyzing contradictory values to ethic of Islam. In another word, to conduct case-based value learning in term of law and ethic is easier than to carry out it in term of creed.

4. Case-Based Value Learning as a Model

Learning value in classroom of Islamic education can be deployed by using a certain model of teaching. Like a model for designing a dress, a model for case-based value learning provides a plan or pattern. Referring to Joyce & Weil (1985), a plan or pattern of teaching model can be used to design face-to-face teaching in classrooms or tutorial settings and to shape instructional materials. Each model is basically constructed by theoretical assumption and consists of some phases for student’s competence improvement.

a. Basic Assumptions

When a theory of value education is applied in developing Islamic education in senior secondary school, there are two basic assumptions that can be placed. First, the theory of value education rooted from the tradition of scientific rationalism has the same purpose as the mission of Islamic education in the context of empowerment of whole human potencies. The statements of Koran that ask human being to think (ta’qilun and ya’qilun) and to think of God (yatafakkarun and tatafakkarun) reflect the need for improving the function of perceiving, feeling, and thinking of doing good conduct. These human potencies are also developed through value education. Second, the framework of value education that consists of various schemes of thinking and dynamic wave of feeling can be replicated for empowering the process of Islamic education in classroom activity. Therefore, the development of Islamic education needs to incorporate religious substance into the framework according to the objectives of teaching-learning in Islamic education.

b. Basic Construct of Case-Based Value Learning

Case-based value learning consists of five steps constructed in the model of N-I-L-A-I. Each letter of word “nilai” (value) represents each step of learning value through Islamic education. Consecutively, each step of this model includes narration of case (narasi kasus), identification of value (identifikasi nilai), literacy of norm (literasi norma), affixation of consciousness (afiksasi kesadaran), and internalization of value (internalisasi nilai). The construct of this model is started from story-telling and ended in value-personalizing (Mulyana, 2005). More detail explanation of each step is presented below.

• Narration of Case
Narration of case is the first step of this model. It is practically conducted through promoting a number of casual stories in real life. Many occurrences can be promoted in this step. A teacher of Islamic education can begin his or her classroom meeting by telling one or more relevant stories with the competence of students or learning topic. The story must be chosen selectively based on the need and the complexity of value dilemma contained in it. By taking 2 of 34 listed competences (Depdiknas, 2003) for students of senior secondary school, the story can be created as the description on the right side column of following matrix.

Student’s Competence Example of Story
Devotion in religious services Story title: Does it mean devotion?
(The story tells a tragic experience of a priest who was invited by someone to convey Islamic lecture in a far distance village. The priest got low payment for his speech; meanwhile his old car driven to the village was broken on the way back home. He had no money for fixing it. Then, he said, “Does it mean devotion?”
Tolerance in social life Story title: “They can. Why can’t we?”
(The story tells a tragic experience of a pious teacher who lives in a religious conflict area. His house was burnt when the conflict occurred even though he himself had never involved in the conflict. One day he attended a seminar of inter-faith harmony and saw the share of brotherhood among leaders of different religions. At the time he said to other participant: “Look at them. They can, why can’t we?”

• Identification of Value
After introducing dilemmatic story to students, a teacher can let them to identify various values contained in the groove of story. In this step, a teacher can ask students a number of problematic questions taken from the story to encourage them to expand their moral value of cognition, affection, and action. The questions should be gradually asked from a simple to a complicated one. The technique of constructing more complicated questions adopts the thinking scheme of value clarification technique (VCT) within discussion on moral value dilemma. Here are the examples.

Student’s Competence Example of Identified Values
Devotion in religious services Story title: Does it mean devotion?
Questions:
 What was the most important value performed by
the priest?
 By grumbling at the payment, did the
priest have genuine devotion? Why?
 Is one’s devotion in religious service directly
connected to the gain of money? Why?
 Supposed the man who invited the priest was your
father, how did you feel?
Tolerance in social life Story title:
“They can. Why can’t we”
Questions
 Do you think that the pious teacher has
high tolerance toward religious diversity?
 Should the teacher’s house be burnt in the
tragedy? Why?
 Did the tolerance attitude of the teacher toward
religious diversity mean that he was a narrow-
minded man? Why?
 Supposed the pious teacher who got his house burnt
was your father, how did you feel?

• Literacy of Norms
In this phase, a teacher lets students learn much about Islamic principles derived from Koran and Prophet Traditions. One or more verses of Koran or proofs of Prophet Tradition are introduced to students. Even memorizing verses or proofs is important for this step, a teacher is preferable to try to lead students into deep comprehension of noble Islamic values. Regarding the two kinds of student’s competence as listed previously, the relevant verses and proofs with the competence are provided below.

Student’s Competence Example of Islamic Norm Reference
Devotion in religious services Surah al-An’am (verse: 162):
“Say, ‘Verily, my prayer, my sacrifice, my living, and my dying are for Allah, the lord of the ‘Alamin (mankind, Jinn and all that exists)”
The Prophet said:
You know well for your business in the earth.
Tolerance in social life Surah al-Baqarah (verse: 256)
“There is no compulsion in religion. Verily the Right Path has become distinct from the wrong path. Whoever disbelieves in taghut and believes in Allah, then he has grasped the trustworthiest handhold that will never break. And Allah is All-Hearer, All-Knower.”

• Affixation of Consciousness
The term “affixation” has similar meaning to “enrichment”. This step, therefore, has function to enrich student’s consciousness in order to comprehend value on the topic of learning. Many other casual social occurrences may be given in this step. The process of affixation is developed on the principle of integration between the issues and the student’s competence. In a simple example, the following matrix provides some alternative cases taken from social occurrences.

Student’s Competence Example of Casual Topic for Affixation of Consciousness
Devotion in religious services  Devotion in doing prayer (compare, which one has
high quality of devotion, doing prayer at mosque
or at house?)
 Devotion in fasting (why can we restrain the
feeling of hunger and thirst?)
 Devotion in sharing alms (compare, who has high
quality of devotion, people who give alms by
official institution or those who do it by his hand
directly?)
 Devotion in helping others (compare, who has
high quality of devotion, people who help his
friend or those who help unknown man?)
Tolerance in social life
 Tolerance attitude toward different religion (Can we
attend a birthday party of a non-Moslem friend?)
 Tolerance attitude toward different Islamic views
(Find the socio-religious issues among Moslems
that reflect intolerance toward the difference of
Islamic views and compare it to find which
member of Islamic organization is more fanatic.
Why?

• Internalization of Value
Broadly speaking, internalization of value virtually involves all processes of learning value in this model. Ideally, the internalization is conducted in action. But as a model emerges from moral cognition, this case-based value learning puts its assumption on a belief that the skill of thinking on high order level can brings about correct and good actions. Based on the assumption, the internalization of value in this model is restricted to simpler one. It is a kind of justification to moral of cognition, moral affection, and predicted action. This simplification is aimed at helping the teachers of Islamic education conveying his subject matter in classroom. Further explanation can be clarified through the following examples.

Student’s Competence Example of Value Internalization
Devotion in religious services  Moral value in cognition
 Do you agree upon this opinion? A Moslem who
conducted pilgrimage to Mecca more than once has
low social concern.
What do you think of a Moslem who conducted
pilgrimage to Mecca spending unlawful money?
 Moral value in affection
(Questions of this part are developed according to
the case story presented in the phase of case
narration)
How do you feel if the priest is your father?
Can you share your unprejudiced feeling to both
the priest and the man?
 Moral value in predicted action
 Can you ensure yourself to get genuine devotion in
your prayer?
 Shall you help whoever need your help?
Tolerance in social life
 Moral value in cognition
 Why should we have tolerance attitude toward
interfaith diversity?
Which one can support the spirit of tolerance,
inclusiveness or exclusiveness? Why?
 Moral value in affection
(Questions of this part are developed according to
the case story presented in the phase of case
narration)
Do you hate the man who burnt the house
of the pious teacher?
How do you feel if the pious teacher is you,
yourself?
 Moral value in predicted action
Can you share your tolerance attitude when you
live in heterogeneous beliefs?
Can you share your money for helping community
of other religion who experience a natural disaster?

The model of case-based value learning is important to develop in senior secondary school in which most of students are able to expand their thinking ability to higher order thinking level. This model, actually is being tried out in two senior secondary schools in Bandung, West Java. In the future, such descriptive model can be more applicable for teachers of Islamic education who need practical guidelines.
Therefore, it is strongly suggested that implementing a courage and doing a hard work be our “future must” to make learning religion in senior secondary schools more critical, contextual, and meaningful.

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Bandung, May 20, 2005