Digital poetry and national belonging among Indonesian migrant children in Malaysia: A SENANDI Mobile-assisted literacy case study
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Abstract
This study examines SENANDI, a mobile-assisted poetry-writing application designed to support Indonesian language learning and national-themed poetic expression among Indonesian primary-school-aged children in a migrant learning setting in Malaysia. The participants were 67 children studying at Sanggar Bimbingan Sungai Mulia 5, Gombak, Kuala Lumpur, a non-formal learning space serving Indonesian migrant children with constrained access to formal schooling. Moving beyond an achievement-oriented account of mobile learning, the study conceptualizes digital poetry as a mediated literacy practice through which administratively vulnerable children articulate homeland, memory, language, and belonging. A qualitative-dominant case study with embedded descriptive rubric analysis was conducted using application screenshots, field documentation, 67 student poems, thematic coding, selected close readings, and a six-aspect analytic rubric. The findings show that SENANDI functioned as a multimodal literacy space connecting national-symbolic interface design, poetry-related learning content, a digital writing interface, and children’s poetry production. Thematic coding revealed that students most frequently positioned Indonesia as a symbolic homeland (85.1%), followed by love of homeland (53.7%), learning and sanggar experience (35.8%), and migrant longing (31.3%). Rubric analysis identified a descriptive gap between national identity expression (M = 3.48) and poetic-linguistic accuracy (M = 2.41). The study contributes the concept of affective entry before linguistic mastery, showing that migrant children may first enter writing through emotional attachment to homeland before they develop fuller control of diction, spelling, stanza organization, and poetic elaboration. The pedagogical value of mobile-assisted poetry writing therefore depends on teacher scaffolding, guided revision, and sustained language support.
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