Curtin student Matt Ferrinda has learnt the old maxim of “not judging a book by its cover” after recently completing his teaching prac at Binus International School in Jakarta.<\/p>\n
In a maths class, he announced the class would begin fractions \u2013 a difficult concept for children to learn.<\/p>\n
‘I was expecting 22 heads to drop…\u00a0 but they were like, “Yeah, wicked! Let’s go.” They were right into it.’<\/p>\n
Matt was very keen to take up the opportunity to teach at Binus, an International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) or “World School”.<\/p>\n
‘Because it’s an IBO school, the curriculum is pretty similar to the West Australian curriculum in some aspects, but it was still teaching a different curriculum in a different cultural environment,’ Matt said.<\/p>\n
‘Seeing another curriculum was good because I had to adapt my teaching style to teach in that context, and that was a challenge.’<\/p>\n
The Binus teaching prac was open to third-year Curtin education students, and Matt says placements help provide students with both teaching practice and a cross-cultural experience.<\/p>\n
‘I had a really good year-four class and a really helpful classroom teacher too, which I think was really important,’ Matt said.<\/p>\n
‘The kids all learn Indonesian, Mandarin and English at school and it was amazing seeing the way they would swap and change between languages.’<\/p>\n
‘They might begin a sentence in English and finish in Mandarin, or one student might ask a question in Indonesian and another would answer in English.’<\/p>\n
Matt said he really enjoyed the opportunity to observe different styles of teaching and\u00a0\u00a0 approaches to learning.
\n‘The kids are all pretty academic, so they’re all really motivated to learn – you don’t have to work to engage them the way you would in Australia,’ Matt said.<\/p>\n
‘The classrooms themselves too are really vibrant and colourful and really well-equipped.’<\/p>\n
‘One thing that was really different from here was the school is situated in three office towers that were seven or eight stories high.’<\/p>\n
Curtin’s third-year education students complete a three-week teaching practicum, but Matt and three fellow students spent four weeks at Binus.<\/p>\n
‘The first week was just observation, so we were able to get accustomed to the school and the environment,’ Matt said.
\nAfter completing the prac, the students spent a week traveling together before returning to Australia to enjoy a break before embarking on their final year of study.<\/p>\n
‘We went to Yogyarkarta in central Java and spent a week seeing a different side of the culture,’ Matt said.
\n‘We saw Buddhist temples, rode buffaloes, planted rice, it was all really cool.’<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Curtin student Matt Ferrinda has learnt the old maxim of “not judging a book by its cover” after recently completing his teaching prac at Binus International School in Jakarta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_oasis_task_priority":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_research-areas":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"research-areas":[],"class_list":["post-4658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campus-and-global-community"],"acf":{"post_options":{"":null,"additional_content":{"title":"","content":"","image":false},"related_courses":false,"credits":{"author":"","photographer":"","media":false},"display_author":true,"banner":{"image":false}}},"featured_image":false,"author_meta":{"first_name":"Jarrad","last_name":"Long","display_name":"Jarrad Long"},"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-04-25 04:03:58","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4658"},{"taxonomy":"research-areas","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtin.edu.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-areas?post=4658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}