Department of English Language Education of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) invited Karen Huchting, Ph.D. from Department of Education Leadership, School of Education, Layola Marymount University, Los Angeles as a speaker at the International Educational Research and Writing Workshop 2018. It was held on Tuesday (17/7) at K.H. Ibrahim Building of UMY.

Department Head Sri Rejeki Murtiningsih, Ph.D. stated that the workshop aimed to enhance teacher quality of conducting research, particularly qualitative research. “Fulbright assisted us to invite a speaker from the United States. This is an effort of professional development and to encourage lecturers to write and publish papers since some of them are less confident of publishing their paper in international journals,” she told.

She also informed, “The workshop is addressed to develop teacher capability in writing. Karen is a Fulbright specialist and she will supervise them through discussions and sharing experiences for three weeks. The teachers, then, will be guided by Karen step by so that they become more confident of conducting research and at the end of workshop they are expected to produce a draft manuscript. Hence, I personally hope that, after the workshop, lecturers can publish and always write papers. Indeed, our capability, as lecturers, can be escalated so that we can supervise our students in writing an undergraduate thesis and students’ writing can be much better and more efficient,” wished Sri.

Additionally, the workshop was attended by 40 lecturers from a number of universities in Yogyakarta as  Universitas PGRI Yogyakarta, Universitas Teknologi Yogyakarta, Universitas Islam Indonesia, Universitas kristen Duta Wacana and UMY as well as 11 master’s and doctoral students from Mali, Turkmenistan, Burundi (Central Africa), Uganda, Laos, Libya, and the Philippines.