TITLE OF PANEL:

LANDSCAPE OF DIGITAL NATIVES’ RELIGIOSITY ON ONLINE-OFFLINE

NEXUS

CHAIR:
Dr. Meinarni Susilowati, M.Ed
UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang
meinarni.susilowati@uin-malang.ac.id

PANELISTS:

1. Wahyudin Halim, Ph.D (UIN Alauddin Makassar)

2. Prof. Dr. Zuliati Rohmah (UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya)
3. Dr. Rahmat Azis (UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang)
4. Achmad Munjid, Ph.D (Universitas Gajah MadaYogyakarta)

PANEL DESCRIPTION

This panel discusses current research on landscape of digital natives’ religiosity with certain
emphasis on how online and offline nexus may construct their religiosity. The digital natives’
life projection into social networking sites has created new dimension of local practices
which stimulate quite contrast offline and online nexus; social phenomena which look very
outspokenly within offline contexts may not be well understood without their online
infrastructures. The fundamental changes substantially challenge existing norms and dramatic
shifts of their life trajectories require further comprehensive investigations. Therefore, this
panel presents multidisciplinary views which focus on their religiosity within social,
psychological, educational, anthropological and sociolinguistic milieus. Sociolinguistically,
the digital natives escalate multifaceted and multilayered performance produced within
multilingual and multimodal contexts. Their offline identity construction can be intricately
interwoven with online identity representation to revealingly show their religiosity. The
complexity of offline and online connection also produces particular psychological needs
centering on their well-beings. Interpersonal engagements on virtual communities through
various channels intriguingly draw different patterns of wellbeing from offline connections.
Furthermore, digital literacy has occupied classroom interactions which endorse the
emergence of different learning styles to welcome the figure of ustadz/ustadzah. Teacher’
readiness is worth noting due to the fact that for escorting the digital natives into targeted
level of religiosity requires agentive values represented by the ustadz/ustadzah . In similar
vein, with inevitable exposure to internet realm and, particularly, their use of social media
platforms for various purposes, pesantren communities have experienced unprecedented
transformation in their perceptions of and interactions with the outside worlds. It also
challenges their long tradition of learning Islamic knowledge and practices. In addition,
global tourism executed by Indonesian young Muslims, especially to Israel, has attracted
investigation due to absorption of religious values of historical places within the digital
natives’ view. Considering the novelty of the above research, I believe that the findings can
contribute significantly to theory generating. The prolific panelists also guarantee publishing
the papers on reputable journals.

PANEL MEMBERS & ABSTRACTS

Title of Abstract : Inevitable Social Media Attachment and the Critical Transformation
of a Pesantren Tradition and Community in Contemporary South Sulawesi
Afiliation: UIN Alauddin Makassar, South Sulawesi
Email: Wahyuddin.halim@uin-alauddin.ac.id

This paper explores the uses of various social media platforms within the community of
Pesantren As’adiyah. Founded by KH. Muhammad As’ad al-Bugisi (1907-1952) in
Sengkang, Wajo, South Sulawesi, As’adiyah is the oldest and still today one of the largest
Islamic education institution as well as socio-religious organization in the province. Through
its numerous religious and social programs, As’adiyah trains and produces Islamic scholars,
teachers, preachers, and imams. Since the 1940s As’adiyah alumni has spread across the
country to mainly work in the religious field but also in other practical fields of life. Long
before they had access to the digital realm, As’adiyah community had maintained a socio-
religious network among themselves in their homeland South Sulawesi as well as in the
diaspora through the regular invitation of preachers and imam from the pesantren to serve in
their places and the sending of their children to study in the pesantren in Sengkang. Since the
introduction and appropriation of digital technologies, many members of this community
(students, teachers, leaders, alumni) started to make use of various social media platform such
as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, to maintain and strengthen their network. This
paper investigates how social media are utilized and appropriated within this pesantren
community in South Sulawesi, Indonesia for various purposes, religious and otherwise. More
specifically, it examines how the exposure and engagement with social media, in particular,
and other online activities more generally, have significantly influenced the social, religious
and political life of this community. In the past, many traditional pesantren such as As’adiyah
had been very cautious in adopting many aspects of modernity in order to preserve its
traditional model of teaching Islamic knowledge to its students. Nowadays, the pesantren has
inevitably opened themselves to accept and use modern technology in their teaching and
preaching programs. With the introduction and appropriation of digital technologies, many
members of this community, especially the youths, have joined major social media platforms
as one way to strengthen and expand their religious authority and influence to a larger
segment of the Muslim communities in South Sulawesi and beyond. Through intermittent
ethnographic field research in Sengkang and other places in South Sulawesi since the early
2019 and a corresponding online research to observe the activities of this community on the
internet, this paper investigates how an active involvement with social media has
significantly transformed this religious community into both a more positive as well critical
direction.
Keywords: pesantren, As’adiyah, social media, digital techno
Title of Abstract : Revealing Millennials’ Styles And Religious Teachers’ Readiness:
Rethinking Education For Digital Natives
Prof. Dr. Zuliati Rohmah
UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya

The twentieth-century teaching methods and 21st-century technologymight be at odds with

each other. While digital immigrants are familiar with a more traditional teaching with chalk-
and-talk approaches, digital nativesare expecting tech-savvy learning styles. The millennials
grow up with connected computers, smartphones, social media, and mobile devices. For them
technology is not something special; it is just the way they communicate. The digital natives
are always-on learners; fast-paced, visually-oriented, and nonlinear. This necessitates teachers
to change their roles; teachers are no longer the only source of information. Today’s students
have access to unlimited contents, may join an online classes, surf the Wikipedia, or get
assistance and advice from others around the globe via social networks. Hence, teachers
should facilitate learning rather than provide teaching.

The current study uncovers the digital natives’ online and offline efforts within the context of
Islamic higher education in Indonesia, who are supposed to be religious. Interviews with a
number of millennials in the above-mentioned context are conducted to know whether they
are more familiar with the online or offline ustadz (religious teachers/clerics), and to gather
information concerning experiences they obtain from direct learning from an ustadzand
online learning via social media. In addition, religious teachers are also interviewed regarding
their readiness to accommodate new styles of learning of the digital natives. The results of
data analysis portray the learning styles of the millennials in their process of becoming more
religious. The data is useful for educators to adapt their attempts to facilitate the millennials’
struggle to be more religious. Similarly, data on the religious teachers’ readiness to adapt to
the millennials’ learning styles is useful for the teachers to reflect on their own styles in
facilitating learning. Institutions responsible for developing the religious teachers’ capacity
will be able to make use of the information to prioritize programs to boost the teachers’
capacity to facilitate the digital natives’ learning.

Keywords: digital natives, learning styles, religiosity

Title of Abstract : The Muslim Millenials’ well-being development

Name : Dr. Rahmat Aziz
Affiliation : UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim
Email : azira@uin-malang.ac.id

Keywords: Engagement, satisfaction, wellbeing

The term student wellbeing has recently received enormous attention both in
academia, politicians and policy makers, especially in the field of education. This issue has
gotten the right momentum because of the existence of children's rights conventions (1989)
and the Ottawa Charter (1986), which states that the state recognizes children's human rights
to enjoy the highest standards of welfare and health. Likewise with the conditions in
Indonesia, since the Jakarta Declaration (1997), the creation of a school environment that is
able to improve the welfare of children has become something important and strategic to do.
At least there are three reasons that can be stated why the study of well-being becomes very
important in education. First, there is a paradigm shift in the world of education which states
that children's academic success is no longer only related to intellectual problems but also
emphasizes the importance of aspects of psychological well-being; second, children are in the
development stage so that they have the potential to experience failure through
developmental tasks that result in low levels of their psychological well-being; and thirdly
there are children who still experience violence in the education process. Data reported by the
Indonesian Child Protection Commission in 2018 which states that in the education
environment there are 72% of cases of violence against children as victims of policy. This
article examined the role of student involvement in schools in developing students' life
satisfaction and well-being. Data was obtained from 641junior high school students in 8 cities
in East Java(Boys = 161, Girls = 480). Data was obtained through three measuring
instruments, namely 1) School engagement scale. This scale was developed to measure the
behavioral, emotional, and cognitive aspects of school engagement; 2) Your life satisfaction
scale. This scale has been used as a measure of the life satisfaction component of subjective
well-being; 3) The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale. This scale was used to
measure mental well-being by asking people how often they have been feeling about things
over the past 2 weeks. The results showed that student engagement in school directly affected
the well-being of students (R = .500 p <.010), and indirectly affected students' life
satisfaction (R = .142 p <.010). This means that student involvement in schools can improve
students' psychological well-being, and the effect will be more effective when these students
have a high level of life satisfaction. The implication of this research is an effort to develop
life satisfaction and wellbeing so students must be actively involved in activities at school.

Keywords: millenials, engagement, satisfaction, wellbeing

Title of Abstract : Visiting al-Aqsa, Revisiting its Contested History and the Changing
Discourse among the Young Palestinian Muslims

Name : Achmad Munjid

Affiiation : Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta
Email : munjid@ugm.ac.id

This paper discusses how collective sacred memory, identity and space are contested around
the shifting narratives of al Aqsa (haram al sharif) as a Muslim public monument built in the
late antiquity period. By way of revisiting its history, architecture and politics, I will explore
the changing roles, meanings, and positions of al-Aqsa in different periods and how it has
become both a point of contestation and reconciliation among young Muslims, Jews and
Christians. The narratives of the Dome of the Rock, either perceived as victorious symbol
over Christian monuments in greater Jerusalem and the identification of the place with
Prophet Muhammad’s spiritual journey of Isra’-Mi’raj, was developed in later period as well
as the polemic over the historical reference of “masjid al aqsa”. This paper will also discuss
about the position of this sacred space within the context of Middle Eastern and Israeli
politics today and how the global tourism and pilgrimage might keep or change the status
quo. By understanding the changing online and offline discourse among young Indonesian
Muslims, I will examine how the global tourism becomes the dividing and uniting force in
different contexts. Through global tourism, on the one hand, the increasing number of young
Indonesian Muslim tourists to Jerusalem might potentially open wider opportunity for them
to have deeper and more meaningful encounter with both Muslim and non-Muslim tourists.
By understanding the complicated history of the sacred place that belongs not exclusively to
Islam, al Aqsa can be seen as interfaith uniting force, an important bridge for interfaith
dialogue. On the other hand, however, due to the Israeli politics and the development of
global conservative turn, especially among young Indonesian Muslims, the Jerusalem
pilgrimage experience might make some other groups believe that al Aqsa and the entire
Muslim world are in a very serious danger. In this case, al Aqsa becomes a dividing force. I
will examine how these positions are being played out in online and offline discourses by
different Indonesian young Muslim groups.

Keywords: identity, space, global tourism, pilgrimage

Short biography of the Chair and the Panelists

Meinarni Susilowati is a senior lecturer at English Language Letters of UIN Maulana Mmalik
Ibrahim Malang. She earned her TESOL master degree from Monash University Melbourne
and her S3 from English Education from Universitas Negeri Malang. In the last 10 years, she
invested her research on the youth language and teacher identity within global contexts. She
has presented her research within national and international conferences.

Wahyuddin Halim is a senior lecturer in Anthropology in the Alauddin State Islamic

University of Makassar, Indonesia. He obtained his first M.A. in International Development
Studies from Dalhousie University, Canada, in 2001, and the second M.A. in Religious
Studies from Temple University, USA (2005). In 2015, he obtained his PhD in Anthropology
from the Australian National University, Canberra. Since September 2015 he held the
position as Director of his university’s Centre for Study of Integration of Islam, Science and
Technology. His research projects focus on the anthropology of Muslim societies in South
Sulawesi, Islamic education and social institutions, the history and anthropology of local
communities in eastern Indonesia. He is the author of several articles published in Review of
Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs(RIMA), Indonesia and the Malay World (IMW), American
Ethnologist, Suvannabhumi Multi-Disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and many
others in Indonesian academic journals.
Google scholar ID: V1CJCTcAAAAJ
Sinta ID: 6024090
Scopus ID: 55794984400

ZuliatiRohmah is a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, UIN

SunanAmpel Surabaya. She finished her doctorate in ELT at UniversitasNegeri
Malang in 2006. A Fulbrighter in 2003, she was also a Humphrey Fellow at the
University of Minnesota.
Rahmat aziz is a doctor in the field of educational psychology. Currently he is a
lecturer in the psychology faculty at the State Islamic University of Malang. The
area of expertise is the psychology of education, specifically the theme of
creativity, life satisfaction, wellbeing, and happiness in students and teachers.

Achmad Munjid teaches at the Department of Inter-Cultural Studies, Faculty of Cultural

Sciences UGM. He holds an MA and PhD in religious studies from Temple University. His
research interests include interfaith dialogue, religious radicalism, freedom of religion,
religious tolerance and minority rights. His forthcoming book is Agama Sebagai Kritik
Sosial.