Cultivating Cultural Literacy through the TANJAK Learning Model: Fostering Students' Understanding of Malay Arts and Culture

Introduction

Universities do more than certify disciplinary knowledge. They also teach students how to read cultural signs, evaluate inherited meanings, and participate in social life without severing themselves from place. In teacher education, this responsibility is especially concrete. Future teachers will carry cultural knowledge into classrooms, textbooks, ceremonies, songs, stories, and everyday interaction. Cultural literacy and intercultural competence, therefore, cannot be reduced to polite awareness of diversity; both require knowledge, interpretation, judgment, and communication (Deardorff, 2006; Al-Afifi et al., 2025; Luo & Chan, 2022; Sabet & Chapman, 2023).

A growing body of research shows that intercultural learning improves when it is intentionally designed. Zhang and Zhou (2019) found, through their meta-analysis, that pedagogical interventions can promote intercultural competence, though their effects depend on the form and depth of the learning experience. Soria and Troisi (2014) reported that internationalization-at-home activities can support students’ global and intercultural development even when they do not study abroad. Leask (2009) reached a similar conclusion from another angle: interaction between home and international students becomes meaningful only when the formal and informal curricula provide structure. Recent reviews extend this argument by showing that intercultural competence develops through transitions, reflection, collaboration, and assessment practices that capture more than self-report confidence (Hang & Zhang, 2023; Luo & Chan, 2022; Guillén-Yparrea & Ramírez-Montoya, 2023; Zhao et al., 2023).

Those findings matter for local-culture pedagogy. Cultural literacy is not built by asking students to memorize isolated facts about heritage. It grows when learners meet cultural objects, ask why they matter, test meanings against credible sources, and communicate their understanding to others. Research on culturally responsive pedagogy and local wisdom education has repeatedly shown that local knowledge can strengthen relevance, identity formation, and student engagement when it becomes part of the curriculum’s intellectual structure rather than a decorative addition (Maaruf & Helmi, 2021; Hidayati et al., 2020; Krissandi et al., 2023; Kusnadi, 2023; Fathurrochman et al., 2025). In Indonesian higher education, Ramli et al. (2025) further showed that local knowledge can guide curriculum innovation when faculty autonomy, institutional support, and community collaboration work together.

Intangible cultural heritage gives this issue sharper pedagogical weight. Music, dance, ritual, craft, clothing, and oral tradition carry public memory. They store values in rhythm, gesture, costume, spatial arrangement, and repeated practice. Studies on heritage education in Spain, Portugal, Zimbabwe, and Indonesia indicate that students learn heritage more deeply when they experience, interpret, and communicate it, not when they only receive descriptive explanations (Castro-Calviño et al., 2020; Valencia Arnica et al., 2023; Heredia-Carroza et al., 2025; Marques, 2025; Garwe, 2025; Yatim et al., 2025). In Malay culture, this approach is crucial because artistic forms such as music and dance, and material symbols such as the tanjak, remain culturally dense but are not always taught through systematic university pedagogy (Amalia et al., 2022; Saleh et al., 2025).

The research gap is therefore specific. Many studies argue that intercultural competence, local wisdom, and heritage education are important. Fewer studies test a locally grounded instructional model through measurable classroom outcomes in higher education. The gap is even more visible in Malay arts learning, where cultural knowledge is often discussed as identity content but less often examined as a staged learning process. Students may recognise a dance or a musical form, yet recognition alone does not guarantee literacy. They must learn to interpret what the form expresses, how it is situated socially, and how it can be communicated responsibly as future teachers.

The TANJAK Learning Model responds to that need through six stages: Temui, Alami, Narasi, Jelajahi, Aksi, and Komunikasi. The sequence begins with an encounter with a cultural object, moves through direct experience and interpretive narration, then continues into guided inquiry, action, or performance, and public communication. The order is deliberate. It joins sensory contact with evidence-based understanding. It also treats students as cultural interpreters rather than passive recipients. This study examines the effectiveness of the TANJAK Learning Model in strengthening preservice elementary school teachers’ cultural literacy in Malay music and dance appreciation at Universitas Riau. It also examines students’ perceptions of the learning experience, particularly the stages that require action, presentation, and peer communication.

Methods

Results

The intervention was implemented in three trial classes across two consecutive course meetings. The first meeting focused on Malay music appreciation, and the second focused on Malay dance appreciation. In both meetings, students completed a pretest before instruction and a posttest after the full TANJAK sequence. The instructional flow, learning resources, and LMS-based assessment procedures were kept as similar as possible across classes.

The implementation was pedagogically coherent. Students first identified the topic and learning goals, then experienced Malay artistic forms through audio, audiovisual, or movement-based materials. They narrated their initial interpretation, explored more credible sources, enacted cultural knowledge through group performance or demonstration, and communicated the meaning of what they learned. The repeated sequence indicates that the score improvement should be read as the result of a full cycle of guided cultural engagement, not a single isolated activity.

Table 2 presents the pretest-posttest summary for both instructional meetings. In Malay music appreciation, the mean score increased from 87.21 to 96.05. The paired-samples t-test showed a statistically significant difference (t = −6.27, p < .05). The variance decreased from 59.88 to 22.09, indicating that student achievement became more evenly distributed after the intervention.

The Malay dance appreciation session followed the same pattern. The mean score increased from 88.83 to 95.64, and the paired-sample t-test again indicated a significant difference (t = −4.61, p < .05). The variance decreased sharply from 163.27 to 30.02. The model therefore lifted the overall mean and reduced score dispersion, a result that is educationally important because local cultural familiarity can differ substantially among students.

Table 3 summarizes students’ responses to the reflection questionnaire. Students rated the overall learning experience very positively (M = 4.78, SD = 0.63), suggesting that they found the model engaging, useful, and culturally meaningful. The Action and Communication stages also contributed to activeness and self-confidence, but students’ responses were more varied (M = 3.54, SD = 1.02). This pattern suggests that public performance and classroom communication were productive, but they required more emotional readiness and stronger scaffolding than the earlier stages. No figures are included in this manuscript.

Discussion

The findings show that the TANJAK Learning Model strengthened students’ cultural literacy in both Malay music and Malay dance appreciation. The evidence is modest but clear. Scores increased in both meetings, and the reduction in variance suggests that improvement was not limited to students who entered the course with stronger prior cultural knowledge. A model of local-culture learning should do precisely this. It should raise achievement while narrowing the distance between students who already feel close to the tradition and those who approach it with uncertainty.

These results align with research on intercultural competence and internationalization in higher education. Deardorff (2006) positioned intercultural competence as an assessable student outcome, while later reviews emphasized that competence develops through knowledge, attitude, interpretation, interaction, and reflective judgement (Al-Afifi et al., 2025; Hang & Zhang, 2023; Sabet & Chapman, 2023). The TANJAK sequence reflects that developmental logic in a local register. Temui and Alami create contact with cultural forms. Narasi and Jelajahi require students to test and refine meaning. Aksi and Komunikasi then ask them to embody and explain that meaning before others. The result is not merely cultural exposure. It is guided cultural work.

The study also supports the argument that local knowledge can serve as an epistemic resource in higher education. Hidayati et al. (2020), Krissandi et al. (2023), Kusnadi (2023), and Fathurrochman et al. (2025) each demonstrate, in different settings, that local wisdom can make learning more context-rich and value-oriented. Ramli et al. (2025) extend this point by placing local knowledge within higher education curriculum innovation. The present study adds an empirical classroom layer to that discussion: Malay arts are not only cultural objects to be preserved; they can organize inquiry, interpretation, and assessment in teacher education.

The findings also resonate with research on heritage education. Castro-Calviño et al. (2020) showed that heritage programmes need to be evaluated on usefulness, efficiency, and effectiveness rather than celebrated solely as cultural symbolism. Valencia Arnica et al. (2023) argued that didactic models in heritage education require active methodologies. Heredia-Carroza et al. (2025), Yatim et al. (2025), Marques (2025), and Garwe (2025) all point in a similar direction: heritage becomes educationally powerful when learners are asked to experience it, relate it to community life, and communicate it as knowledge. TANJAK follows that line of reasoning, but does so through Malay music and dance, two domains in which meaning is carried through sound, movement, dress, rhythm, and collective memory.

The reflection data deserve careful attention. Students rated the overall learning experience highly, yet their responses to Action and Communication were more varied. This is understandable. A student can understand a cultural concept privately and still hesitate when asked to perform, present, or speak before peers. Intercultural group-work research shows that collaboration becomes productive when students perceive value in diversity and when the classroom climate supports risk-taking (Li et al., 2023; Haregu et al., 2024). Assessment research reaches the same conclusion from a different angle: competence is complex, and visible performance often depends on confidence, social safety, and task clarity (Luo & Chan, 2022; Zhao et al., 2023). The lower mean for Action and Communication should therefore be read as a practical signal. These stages are valuable, but they need rehearsal, peer mentoring, and formative feedback.

The contribution of this study lies in its operational detail. Many studies recommend cultural relevance; fewer specify how students move from first encounter to public communication. TANJAK offers one possible answer. It treats cultural literacy as an active sequence: see, feel, narrate, investigate, do, and communicate. That sequence is particularly important for preservice elementary teachers. They need more than cultural pride. They need the pedagogical ability to transform cultural forms into learning experiences that are accurate, respectful, and intelligible to children.

Several limitations should be acknowledged. The study used a one-group design without a comparison class, so the results indicate initial effectiveness rather than strong causal superiority. The intervention lasted only two meetings and was conducted at a single institution. The outcomes were measured through LMS-administered tests and a self-report reflection questionnaire; long-term retention, teaching transfer, and performance quality were not measured directly. Future research should involve comparison groups, longer implementation periods, classroom observation, student interviews, and performance-based rubrics that can capture how students interpret and enact cultural meaning over time.

Conclusion

The TANJAK Learning Model proved effective in strengthening students’ cultural literacy in Malay arts and culture during the limited trial. Across two instructional meetings, students’ posttest scores were significantly higher than their pretest scores, and score dispersion narrowed after the intervention. The model also generated a strongly positive learning experience because it treated culture as something to be explored, interpreted, practiced, and communicated.

The study remains preliminary. Its one-group design, short duration, single-campus setting, and reliance on course-based assessment limit the scope of the claims. Even so, the findings suggest that culture-based learning can be designed with enough pedagogical structure to produce measurable gains in higher education. Future studies should test TANJAK with control groups, longer cycles, broader cultural domains, and performance assessments that examine whether students can carry Malay cultural literacy into teaching practice and community engagement.

Contribution to the literature

This study extends the literature on cultural literacy and culture-based learning in three ways. First, it offers empirical evidence from Malay arts education in higher education, a context that remains underrepresented in broader research on intercultural and heritage education. Second, it operationalizes cultural literacy through a six-stage instructional model rather than presenting it only as a curricular aspiration. Third, it shows that a locally grounded model can improve outcomes across two artistic forms - music and dance - while also revealing which stages need stronger scaffolding for student confidence.

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval for this study was granted by the Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Universitas Riau (2765/UN19.5.1.1.5/AK/2025; 10 December 2025). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants before data collection. Participants were informed that participation was voluntary and that their anonymized responses would be used for research reporting.

Software availability

Microsoft Excel was used for descriptive statistics and paired-sample t-tests. An open-access alternative, such as LibreOffice Calc, JASP, jamovi, or R, can reproduce the same descriptive and paired-test analyses.