Department of Adat Law FH UGM held a Workshop with the title “Challenges and Support Towards Adat Law’s Teaching Innovation” on Monday (25/11/2024) in Room B55 FH UGM. This event was attended by several Adat Law educators from numerous University in Sumatra, Java, and Bali: Andalas, Riau, Padjajaran, Atma Jaya Yogyakarta, Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta, Diponegoro, Airlangga, Surabaya, Brawijaya, Tidar, Trunojoyo, and Udayana. This workshop was response from “Meeting on Innovation of Teaching Adat Law” that have been conducted at 15 January 2024, the collaboration between Universitas Gadjah Mada and the Van Vollenhoven Institute, Leiden University.
In this workshop, Tody Sasmitha Jiwa Utama and Rikardo Simarmata asked for a response from the participants towards their publication with Jacquiline Vel and Adriaan Bedner with the title “New Ways of Teaching Adat (Customary) Law at Indonesia Law School” that has been published on The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies and have been freely translated in Indonesian. This writing is identifying the challenges of the adat law educators that often underestimated by the students as field of law that is outdated and irrelevant with the modern society. The educators/lecturers also often faced difficulties in improving their innovation due to the institutional issues and the lack of connection.
Rising from this problem, this workshop digged deeper the experience of the Adat Law educators in creating innovations regarding the topics in their courses along with identified the needs to strengthen the human resources and the connection between educators.The follow-up plan for this activity is to create innovation guidelines for Customary Law courses and other courses to be sensitive to customary law, update teaching materials, training on socio-legal approaches in customary law, and textbooks. Discussions on innovation in teaching customary law will continue in Panel 17 Round Table: Transformative Power of Teaching Customary Law (New Style) on January 15, 2025 at the International Conference of the Commission on Legal Pluralism held at the Faculty of Law, University of Indonesia. In addition, the Department of Customary Law also plans to hold a workshop on innovation in teaching customary law for customary law teachers in 2025.
Author : Sartika Intaning Pradhani (Lecturer at the Department of Customary Law)
