DIALOGUE AS WAY TO ENGAGE EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION (ECE) STUDENT TEACHERS WITH THEIR LEARNING: A CASE STUDY IN UNIVERSITAS TERBUKA

Abstract

Universitas Terbuka (UT) is the only university in Indonesia that fully uses distance education (DE) system. UT has Early Childhood Education (ECE) study program and the students are kindergarten and ECE teachers. In UT, the common and the main learning process are given using online which be called online tutorials. This study investigated student teachers’ engagement in their learning. The respondents were UT’s ECE student teachers who participated in one ECE Writing Scientific Article course during April to June 2023. The research question of this study is how dialogue can increase students’ engagement in their learning? For this study, students’ engagement will be shown if the students actively participated in the online tutorial and in the WhatsApp group discussion provided by the tutor who were also one of the researchers. To help students to be more engage in their learning the researchers used dialogue. Students can be called engaged in their learning if the students involved in the discussions and did their tasks. The reason for this study was it was found that in the first 3 weeks of the online tutorial, only 5 from 15 students participated in the online discussion  either in webinar tutorial or in WA group.  This study used qualitative approach with observation. The data were analyzed descriptively. After the researchers used dialogue with the students, there was a rise in the number of  the students who participated in the Writing Scientific Article course. The results of this study was before the course finished in June 2023, there were 12 students who were really engaged in their course which was shown by writing the scientific paper as the tasks of the ECE Writing Scientific Article course. It was shown also that using dialogue with the students can increase students’ engagement in learning.