This study investigates how lesson study (LS) has been sustained in Indonesia beyond external project support under conditions of reform instability. It examines how university-based teacher educators acted as key mediators in maintaining continuity across changing policy environments.
Drawing on longitudinal qualitative fieldwork at two university-based LS hubs in Indonesia, the study uses semi-structured interviews, field notes and documentary materials. The analysis adopts an interpretive, inductive approach to examine how LS was sustained across shifting institutional and policy contexts.
LS persisted in Indonesia not because reform environments became stable but because key actors – especially university educators – continuously mediated its meaning, form and legitimacy across policy, university, district and school arenas. The analysis identified four interrelated forms of mediation: moral, pedagogical, institutional and relational. Sustainability, therefore, emerged not as a condition of stability but as an ongoing negotiated accomplishment through which LS was preserved, adapted and legitimized under conditions of reform instability.
The study focuses on two university-based LS hubs and does not provide detailed classroom-level analysis. Future research should examine how negotiated sustainability is enacted in classroom practice and across a wider range of institutional contexts.
The findings suggest that sustaining LS depends not only on program design or policy alignment but also on universities’ capacity to build long-term school partnerships, support mentoring arrangements and maintain spaces for pedagogical inquiry across institutional boundaries.
By framing sustainability as a negotiated process rather than a technical achievement, the study highlights the role of intermediary actors in sustaining collaborative professional learning under conditions of reform instability.
The study offers a process-oriented account of sustainability in LS. It advances the concept of negotiated sustainability and demonstrates how universities can function as mediating actors in sustaining collaborative professional learning over time.
