Quality Learning Environment and Community Participation: Report on a Literacy Boost Project in Indonesia

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This article reports the outcomes of community participation and quality learning education resulting from the MEMBACA II project. MEMBACA (Making Early Matter through Books and Community Action) is a literacy project that targets young children in Indonesia. The MEMBACA project includes teacher training, community reading activities, and age-appropriate local language material creation to support emergent literacy skills among early-grade children. These skills include letter awareness, single-word reading of most used words, reading fluency, reading accuracy, and reading comprehension. 31 participants involved in this study, purposively selected to be interviewed through the phone. The thematic analysis found that a better learning environment was produced, a code of conduct is now available in schools, and it has helped in mainstreaming a more positive disciplining approach to teachers. This study has also identified that villages are now allocating their village fund for supporting literacy activities, although the process has experienced a setback in the year 2020 due to the pandemic. Further, while teachers’ capacities were increased due to various activities, learning environments are still troubled by poor infrastructures and a lack of community awareness. Engagement of communities and local government were mostly improved, with major problem lies in the continuity of the literacy-related activities, affected by various factors including poor advocacy and COVID-19 pandemic.