Beyond Immersion: Indonesian Language Courses at Harvard

With 17,000 islands, Indonesia is home to 275 million people and Bahasa Indonesia is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. And according to Harvard University Preceptor in Indonesian Sakti Suryani, it is a language that opens doors to incredibly rich and diverse fields of study.  

Suryani, who came to Harvard from the University of Wisconsin, Madison where she served as Indonesian Lecturer, is ready to begin her second year as Preceptor in Indonesian at Harvard University. As she did in 2023-24, Suryani will be teaching Beginning, Intermediate, and Advanced levels of Indonesian Language courses in 2024-25. She hopes to build on the successful elements of last year’s courses, and to use student feedback to create new content. For example, in her Advanced courses, Suryani uses her students’ research interests to create lesson plans. Her past courses also included a trip to the Peabody Museum to view a curated exhibit of everyday objects from Indonesia (the Peabody’s Indonesian collection includes over 600 objects), which was used to create fruitful discussion topics about the things that interest students, including the creation of Sumba cloth. Her courses are rigorous and challenging, but according to Suryani beginning students are often surprised at their rapid progress.  

“There are a few things about the Indonesian language that make it easier for English-speaking students to learn, including the lack of verb tenses and the Roman alphabet,” says Suryani. “By the end of the first semester, students in my beginning class were shocked that they could already converse with each other about daily life in basic Indonesian.” 

Suryani is excited about continuing to develop courses this fall. Prospective students can look forward to film screenings, visiting speakers from a variety of Indonesia’s islands, engagement with the Harvard Indonesian Students Association, language tables at Harvard’s Language Center, visiting Indonesian festivals, gamelan music performances, karaoke outings, and a possible visit to Somersworth, New Hampshire’s Indonesian district. And don’t be surprised if some of these activities include locally-made Indonesian snacks. 

Sudarshana Chanda, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History who researches interethnic intimacies in British Malaya, benefitted from Suryani’s dynamic teaching style in the Indonesian courses she took last year, which allowed her to excel at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Bu Sakti herself is the highlight of the course,” says Chanda. “She has incredible energy; her excitement to teach us left us with no option but to be excited to learn.” 

About Sakti Suryani: 

After growing up in the Indonesian town of Wonogiri, Central Java, Sakti began studying at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008, where she became interested in teaching English as a Second Language, eventually obtaining TESOL certification as a part of her undergraduate degree program. At the same time, she also took advantage of several opportunities to participate in ongoing Indonesian language curriculum development projects at UW-Madison, which opened the door for her to pursue her present career.  

Sakti began teaching Indonesian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the fall of 2014. She also taught Indonesian language in the Defense Critical Language and Culture Program (DCLCP), an innovative distance learning center located at the University of Montana-Missoula, at various times between 2015 and 2017.  

Since summer 2019 she has taught intensive classes in Indonesian (and, occasionally, Javanese) language, at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at UW-Madison. She served twice as the Coordinator for the Indonesian Language Program at SEASSI on summer 2022 and 2023.   

Since Fall 2023, Sakti has been teaching Indonesian language at Harvard University. She also serves as Secretary for the Council of Teachers of Southeast Asian Languages (COTSEAL) and just began serving as the Departmental Liaisons for Equity Inclusion, and Diversity (LIED) for AY 2024-2025 at the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University.