This article reports on English teachers' attitudes towards a professional development program run by Coursera (coursera.org). These teachers were participants of Foundation of Teaching for Learning 1: Introduction online course. Using a survey case study, the findings reveal that most of the participants perceive the course as a well-organized and effective platform to engage in professional learning. Coursera is an online learning platform offering various courses for teacher educators which are meaningful (closely related to their daily teaching practice) and vibrant (involves active collaboration among peer participants to review and assess their projects). Albeit this nature, another finding shows that the participants lament that their institutions do not provide professional development (PD) support. In fact, PD programs are not constrained to faceto-face encounters, since it can be designed using online platforms such as Coursera, a massive open online course (MOOC). Accordingly, the contribution of the article is to show how online platforms make meaningful and vibrant teacher professional development (TPD) possible. The implication of the study is that school administrators and policy makers should provide support for their teachers to take online PD programs. This professional learning should contribute to the best teaching practice and student learning attainment. In the context of English language pedagogy (ELP), English teachers are facing a challenge to foster their professional development; while at the same time, they are occupied by administrative work at school, initiatives to improve students' abilities, and growing needs for bringing themselves up-todate with the literature on ELP. These demands require English teachers to juggle different roles as teacher administrators, language course designers, curriculum implementers, evaluators, and professional learners. KeywordsMany countries have invested heavily in TPD activities. This investment plays a crucial role in ensuring quality pedagogical practice, which should have significant implications for both teacher professional learning and student learning. In short, this millennium has witnessed the fact that TPD is clearly an important dimension of enhancing education through improving the quality and expertise of teachers or educators. This recognizes interconnectedness between quality and vibrant TPD and student learning performance. More crucially, professional teachers should engage in such TPD programs so that they can see themselves as life-long learners who own a sustained passion for developing their professionalism and for making innovation and changes in their own classroom practices.PD programs are a systematic and concerted effort to bring about innovation and changes in classroom practices of teachers, their attitudes and beliefs, and learning outcomes of students (Guskey, 2002). He then proposes a model of teacher change as the upshot of teachers' PD programs as seen in Figure 1. This model suggests a different sequence...

This study investigated the culture representation  of two prescribed English textbooks suggested by the Indonesian Curriculum and Publishing Centre (Puskurbuk) used in high schools in Indonesia. Its aim was to investigate whether the representation of culture supported the main goal of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teaching, which is intercultural communicative competence (ICC). For this purpose, culture was classified as source, target, and international target culture (Cortazzi & Jin, 1990). A classification on the level of ICC was also conducted to these textbooks.  It was found that the prescribed English textbooks portrayed the culture of local (Indonesia), the culture of target countries (American and British), and the culture of other international countries in a quantitatively similar portion. However, qualitatively, the presented culture tended to be artificial instead of substantial. Comparison and contrast among cultures were not found, therefore, intercultural competence was not achieved.

With the economic development of Indonesia in the recent years, there has been a large number of Indonesian students continue their higher education in overseas countries, particularly Australia. Hence, examining their perceptions, challenges and experiences to adapt to the Australian English learning environment becomes an interesting attribute to explore. Drawing on this issue, the in-hand study explores how Indonesian learners dealt with challenges and difficulties in Australian education environment. Employing a qualitative research, this study involved eight Indonesian learners enrolled in English language programs in a number of Australian universities. Using interview as the instrument, the findings showed that the participants perceived a positive perception toward the communication activities during the teaching and learning practices; however, they encountered some difficulties related to grammar instruction within communicative practice. The results of interview further revealed that most of the learning difficulties they experienced were due to their prior exposure and habit to Indonesian teaching and learning styles. The participants further conveyed that enhancing English ability and building confidence were two most possible ways to deal with the difficulties.  These results contribute as fruitful insights for teachers to be aware of different learners’ styles and needs, particularly those coming from various cultural backgrounds, so that they could engage in more interactive teaching and learning activities.

The collaborative work consisting of corresponding poems between an Adelaide-based poet Arnis Silvia and a Prayagraj-based poet Susheel Sharma deals with anthropological phenomena like identity, ecological awareness and social justice. Taking the geographical background in both resident cities, the six pairs of poems reflect on how both the poets understand the world around them along with its impact on them personally and socially. The poets have employed some principles of duoethnography in their poetic conversations by dialoguing themselves with another self, with another context of culture, tradition, values, histories and meaning-making (Sawyer & Norris 2012). The authors have attempted to put themselves in someone else's shoes and have tried to see the world through their and others' eyes to better understand the reality(ies) that were portrayed in the poems. The authors have discovered that despite their geographical and cultural differences, they share many similarities in terms of the issues they deal with daily; they struggle with their selves to make sense of the world and they reflect on realities in their surroundings to understand them better. Biographical notes:Arnis Silvia is an Indonesian-born bilingual poet who is currently undertaking a PhD programme in Language and Linguistics, University of South Australia. She tutored English for Creative Writing. She writes poetry in both Indonesian and English and has published two books of poems in Indonesian: Titi Kala Mangsa (2017) and Niskala (2019) and one in English, Behind the Closed Door (2017). She has participated in some poetry open mics in Adelaide. She is a member of some literary groups and has published her English poems in Verse Magazine and HLT Magazine.Dr Susheel Kumar Sharma (b 1962) teaches English at the University of Allahabad, Prayagraj-211002, the fourth-oldest university of modern India. Prof. Sharma has three collections of poems in English viz. From the Core Within (1999), The Door is Half Open (2012) and Unwinding Self (2020) to his credit besides several research papers, interviews and book reviews. Some of his poems have been translated into Assamese, French, Lithuanian, Polish, Sanskrit, Serbian, Turkish and Ukrainian languages.