Abstract
Environmental literacy helps to address key challenges in providing sustainable development for the developing third world countries. This can be qualified based on the active practice of promoting environmental awareness inside the classroom and innovative curriculum change among many educational systems. To provide a glimpse of the current situation of environmental education at the senior high school level, this pioneering qualitative research study based on grounded theory was conducted for Indonesia by interviewing 21 experienced teachers from Palembang. Two main themes were identified from the coded responses of the teachers on the semi-structured questions framed for this study. These themes were (i) teachers’ insights on the current teaching pedagogies in Indonesia and how these strategies are used to integrate environmentally important issues and (ii) the prospective of improving the environmental education in Indonesian high schools. Teachers interviewed in this study agree that (1) a more outcome-based strategy should be applied in teaching environmental knowledge in the classroom, (2) educational policies that raise awareness about environmental problems in Indonesia, especially the increasing bad air quality in the country, is seen as both a priority and an opportunity and (3) students attitudes, society’s apathy and ignorance, and government’s implementations are the challenges in developing environmental education subject for most Indonesian schools.
Highlights
It sounds cliché, the notion that the current younger generation will inherit the harsh outcome of environmental degradation brought upon by economic development might still hold true
The whole interview process is divided into three-parts discussion components namely, (i) profiling component – where the participants are asked about the length of their teaching experience and how they feel about their current teaching experience with the millennial students; (ii) integrating component – where the participants answered questions regarding their strategies in incorporating environmental issues in their topics in class and the limitations of environmental education in the current system of education and lastly; (iii) prospecting component – where the participants conveyed their opinions on the needs to improve the awareness of students on environmental issues and how the school should cope-up with the speedily evolving educational landscape
The 21 teachers interviewed in this study all agreed that this generation has different learning styles and that the digital age plays influences on how these students would view their responsibilities in protecting nature
Summary
The notion that the current younger generation will inherit the harsh outcome of environmental degradation brought upon by economic development might still hold true. The survey of students has indicated the increasing awareness of students on the physical impacts brought about by climate change (Rahman, Hossain, Zaman, & Mannan, 2018; Freije, Hussain, & Salman, 2017), plastic pollution (Hammami, Mohammed, Hashem, Al-Khafaji, Alqahtani, Alzaabi, & Dash, 2017), renewable energy (Edsand & Broich, 2019) and invasive species (Schreck-Reis, Marchante, Freitas, & Marchante, 2013) Such awareness can be attributed to the value of environmental education efforts invested by many countries worldwide. Educating the 21st-century learners with the right amount of long-term knowledge and competitive soft skills is a wise investment for any developing nation that envisioned a more sustainable livelihood and a better quality of life for its community This idea served as a Darmawan & Dagamac / Interdisciplinary Journal of Environmental and Science Education backbone of many international policy discourses, i.e. the United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) 4 that aim to develop “Quality Education” for all the citizen of this world (Kopnina, 2020). Some countries in Asia are focused more on national development than social and ecological sustainability (Furihata & Ninomiya-Lim, 2017)
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