Connecting student to the ecology: content knowledge for conservation education in Indonesia

Abstract

One of the keys to meaningful environmental and conservation education depends on the design of appropriate content knowledge, enhancing the ecological literacy of the student. Here, we scrutinize essential content knowledge and develop subject-specific pedagogy for teaching ecology regarding high school conservation education. We stood on the qualitative research by employing the R & D methods according to the ADDIE design. We employed inductive techniques to gain essential ecological concepts and principles from related references. We identified fourteen ecological concepts and principles, namely population and community properties, biological interaction, keystone species, species with a large impact, energy flows, biogeochemical cycle, conservation ecology, diversity index measurement, factors affecting distribution and abundance, the linkage between genetic diversity and population persistency, fragmentation and population size, diversity and community stability, carrying capacity, and ecological succession as important content in ecology that is essential for conservation education. We developed the subject-specific pedagogy for teaching ecology and gained an effective result during its implementation on both the cognitive aspects and the behavioral intention. Our results clearly imply the importance of knowledge of essential concepts and principles in ecology in engendering sympathy towards nature and conservation.