Indonesia is a multi-cultural country consisting of various ethnic groups and different religions. In the last few years, clashes among different ethnic groups and religions happened because the national values that we had held over decades were corrupted and thinning out.
One of the values is tolerance. Actually tolerance is a global problem. The US Embassy in Lithuania and the Regional English Language Office in Budapest held a summer camp to sponsor tolerance and the learning of English within an ethnically diverse environment in Budapest. Teaching tolerance is about teaching friendship among teenagers and learning how to deal with different commonplace ethnical issues which one can ignore easily.
This paper attempts to give the readers a number of useful activities on how to incorporate teaching tolerance through English in the classroom. Among others, teachers need to engage students in a dialogue about a variety of topics using cooperative learning methods.
Consequently, the role of the teacher as a facilitator requires students to take greater responsibility for their own learning. Students need to be more engaged and bring forward their personal experience and backgrounds, enrich those backgrounds with the materials from the printed media and web-sites.
Hopefully, this paper will give insights to English teachers to make use some of the methods offered for not only teaching tolerance but other aspects of character building as well. |