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

Representation of Ethnic/Religious Minorities in Social Studies Curriculum: Implications for Education for Pluralism

This qualitative case study aims to explore the representation of the ethnic/religious minorities in the National Social Studies Curriculum of Pakistan. Pakistan is a multi-lingual, multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation with the province of Sindh alone being rich in diversity, with many spoken dialects and more than a dozen different ethnic communities residing in Sindh. In order to appreciate the richness of our context, it is imperative that the true essence of differences is inculcated through our education system. Curriculum and what is included in it is of the utmost importance in this regard. Thus, to see how curriculum represents the minorities of our country, various documents including National Educational Policy 2009, Social Studies Curriculum 2002 and 2006 History Curriculum and Social Studies textbook were reviewed to generate the data. Beside this, interviews with curriculum developers and social studies subject specialist were conducted to authenticate the data that came from documents analysis. Findings illustrate that the minorities are represented in our national curriculum in an abstract way. Various tools have been used to exclude and include the discourse of minority in curriculum. School history and the constructs of Ideology of Pakistan are the main tools. Study also found a difference between 2002 social studies curriculum and 2006 curriculum. Representation of the minority in 2006 curriculum is more positive than the 2002 curriculum which is currently in use. On the basis of findings, study strongly recommends, that ‘silent’ histories pertaining to diverse cultural heritage of Pakistan need to be represented in the curriculum as well as textbooks need to be re-written to reflect the spirit and ethos of the 2006 curriculum which relatively seems to reflect the appreciation of diversity.