akademisi.net-In the history of Indonesian education, the national curriculum has experienced several revisions since 1990s, namely, 1994, 2004, 2006, and the latest in 2013. The revisions are logical consequences of the change of the political system, social, cultural, economic, and global challenges. The entire national curriculum is designed based on the Pancasila and the 1945 Constitution. The difference however, is in the emphasis on its goals and implementation approaches. The new orientation of the educational goals of the 2013 national curriculum is in emphasizing students’ character development. This is congruent with the Rencana Aksi Nasional Pendidikan Karakter 2010 (National Action Plan for Character Education 2010) which defines character education as values education, norms education, moral education, and traits education which develop students’ competencies to decide between right and wrong, maintaining the goodness and virtues in their daily life wholeheartedly.
It is stated in the document of the National Action Plan for Character Education 2010, that character development orientation is required for responding to the failures of educational practices that result in social problems faced in recent years. Horizontal, vertical and primordial conflicts of society, separatist movements, corruption, collusion, and nepotism are noted as the impact of the failures of developing students’ character. Bad behaviours, such as cheating, plagiarism, vandalism, bullying, students-gang, harassment, and even murders, bloom almost everywhere in the life of students (National Education Framework for Character Education, 2010). Thus internalizing good character to students through the Character Education implementation is expected to be in line with the theme of national education “The Rise of Indonesia Golden Generation” echoed in 2012.
Apart from that, a curriculum is vital in education. Its quality and standards evidently promote the quality of education. Countries develop their curriculum and design educational programs according to the needs of students time to time in order to state the measurable and achievable quality and standards of education. The change in curriculum obviously affects educational apparatus and one of them is the textbook. As a fundamental material for lessons, the textbook has a prominent role in the classroom. Both teachers and students will find the textbook as the most important resource for teaching and learning activities. With its classified features and systematic arrangement, a textbook will become an instructional tool, teaching aids, and source of knowledge for both teachers and students. Graves (2007) says that “some teachers use a textbook as the backbone of their courses” (p.174). It is because, besides providing materials for the lessons, most of the well-arranged textbooks give the clear aims and objectives of the lessons. In other words, the textbook is like a rail-track to reach the destinations of the learning journey.
Textbook also functions as an instructional resource for teachers. The material resources—for most of what is taught—which are provided by the textbook (Eisner, 1987 as cited in Ornstein & Sinatra, 2005) enable teachers to organize information and activities. According to Ornstein and Sinatra (2005), it is stated when textbooks are solely used as an instructional resource, they become the only point of view in a course. As for instance, in the English language class for foreign learners, it is almost impossible to systematically conduct English lesson without a textbook. The teacher might possess knowledge of English language from her experience, but if she does not have a clear and specific step-by-step methods and activities to conduct the lessons in the classroom, this situation most probably would bring both the teacher and the students to the failure of achieving good progress. Therefore, the English language teaching textbook is utmost necessity in an English language class.
Considering the textbook as an instructional resource, “nation-wide textbooks tend to be general, noncontroversial and bland, and do not consider local issues or community problems” (Ornstein & Sinatra, 2005, p.381). Nevertheless, the national textbook is written to meet learning objectives prescribed by the national curriculum which is mostly reflected in the textbooks. It can be said that textbook is a manifestation of the national curriculum whereby the issues and concerns of the national curriculum can be identified.
Specifically, it is undeniable that textbooks used in the classrooms can be seen as the medium of communication from curriculum developers and textbooks authors to the teachers and students. As for instance, an English textbook is authored carrying certain methods to deliver contents to students. In addition, the content of English textbook is certainly arranged to meet specific purposes.
