Pesantren Virtual: Dinamisasi atau Disrupsi Pesantren?

The industrial revolution that penetrated the world of education forced Islamic boarding schools (Pesantren), as part of education, to mutate in new form to find the ideal format as an adaptive step to keep up to date. Pesantren which have a cultural base of traditional society make various efforts to make acculturation with technology. The efforts of these pesantren can be seen from the number of pesantren websites, which provide information about pesantren and religious programs online. On the other hand, virtual pesantren have also emerged, which do not have a real pesantren institutional base in the community, using online media as an operational base. Some of these virtual Islamic boarding schools have strong buildings in cyberspace, with a wider reach than Islamic boarding schools. Its flexible and open nature makes virtual pesantren have their own community in cyberspace. Furthermore, problems arise when virtual Islamic boarding schools intersect with conventional Pesantren in cyberspace. This research is a library research that uses printed and online media as data sources. This study aims to find differences in the characteristics of virtual pesantren, and their relationship with the dynamics of pesantren in the era 4.0. From the content analysis conducted at several virtual pesantren, it was found that some of them used the same name as real pesantren, thus creating ambiguity of virtual pesantren

Enquiry - Based Teaching: Heart of Critical Thinking

Critical thinking (CT) is one of the important dimensions and goals of education which is expected of the students. It has been studied and reported that due to traditional teaching strategies, students think in ‘black and white’ (Dean, 2007) and rote memorisation has become part of our education system (Aly, 2007). Critical thinking requires an environment where students are engaged in different challenging and thoughtful tasks. There are different strategies to engage students in activities like; discussion, debate, reading, problem solving and enquiry. To study how enquiry-based teaching facilitates students’ CT, an action research was conducted with Grade VIII science students in Ibn-e-Sina Government High School, Karachi, as part of my M.Ed. course at AKU-IED. There were 32 students in the class and 26 of them willingly participated in this study. Pre and post interviews of five of the participants, one class observation and six teachings were the data collection steps of this study. The data revealed that the existing teaching practises in that class were more teacher-oriented which hindered students’ critical thinking. However, the data at the intervention stage indicates that enquiry facilitates CT of students by developing their skills of data collection and data evaluation, argumentation and questioning, and also shifting their attitude from teacher dependency to self-learning. It is important to provide students with opportunities to learn by experiencing and sharing their ideas fearlessly. This study data informs that enquiry enhances students’ autonomy to learn from each other and on their own. There is an intense need to shift the teaching and learning process from teacher centredness to learner centredness to make them critical thinkers, and enquiry is one of the most effective teaching and learning processes which ensures learners’ centrality. However, teachers’ CT and pedagogical skills are indispensable to implement enquiry-based teaching in real and large classrooms.