Dinny Risri Aletheiani - "Educating the Indigenous Communities: The Case of Orang Rimba"

Adapting to new environmental changes in their ancestral forest due to the openings and consequences of plantations, forest industry, transmigration areas, national park conservations, and for many, being removed from their home, Orang Rimba children and their families, inhabited the rainforest of Southern Sumatera, are faced with new ways of living and are being approached by several outside groups and targeted as subject for new “educational project.” This presentation will describe the nature of this new “educational project”—its emergence, curriculum, practices, implications to language, and mechanism of marginalizing and educating the indigenous communities.

Dinny Risri Aletheiani is a faculty member at the Council on Southeast Asia Studies in the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and Director of Southeast Asia Language Studies at Yale University. Her publications and research are in the areas of curriculum studies, curriculum history, historical archive, indigenous education, cross-cultural interactions, education and schooling in Indonesia, Southeast Asia diaspora consciousness, language and art practices, language learning, and Indonesian language curriculum. Her recent scholarly publications appear in Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, The Curriculum Journal, Itinerant Curriculum Theory edited book. She has also performed theaters, dance performances, and choreography internationally. She received her PhD in Curriculum Studies from Arizona State University.