I've now had the chance to look at something I have wanted to do since a few weeks back. That's the Kadazandusun teachers' responses to the questionnaire I distributed through a kind, recently met neighbour (Thanks C :)). This is part of a small scale project I've been working on this year. To evaluate the teaching and learning of KD in Sabah schools after over a decade.
It is not easy to offer a minority language, any minority language as a formal subject in school. And I think the KD community has done well with that. From a mere trial phase in 1997, the language was officially offered in schools in 2000. With very little resources and a lot of obstacles. Salute to the pioneers.
One of the biggest obstacles was that KD is a so-called standard language that no one speaks, and there was no reference grammar to help the teachers taught then. So the teachers who speak real dialects got so confused, some of them even stopped teaching. Who could blame them anyway?
But the resilient ones hung on. They went to workshops, courses, brainstorming sessions and textbook meetings, and produced teaching and learning materials. Maybe the materials were not perfect, but it's the efforts that count. I'd say to anyone who criticize them without thinking, to go produce better ones. (I, myself ended up trying to figure out the grammar of my dialect because...somebody has to? Nah, because I want to).
Anyway, more than a decade later, KD is still there in schools. Yes, there definitely is room for improvement, but I believe in acknowledging and appreciating sincere efforts. If anything, sincere efforts that might be not so perfect are worth a thousand times more than pompousness.
And so I am so happy to discover in the questionnaire that all of the teachers who responded say that they are happy teaching KD, that they would deepen their knowledge on KD, and that they would continue to teach the language in years to come. Teachers, I am in awe of your dedication. It's a journey, of which, no one knows where it will end.
Note: No, I have not been involved in the preparation of KD teaching in schools, nor have I ever had the pleasure of teaching KD in schools. But I have been an accidental KD instructor (material developer mostly) in UMS since a few years back, and now even an occasional teacher when we have enough students to distribute among us three teachers (two of them are language teachers employed to teach KD). Despite having another set of job description teaching something else (my tugas hakiki real job), I always welcome the opportunity to conduct a KD class. We adopt a slightly different approach than the one in schools, and I'd like to think that we are improving gradually in UMS :)
