Situation of Environmental Education in Senior High School Programs in Indonesia: Perspectives from the Teachers of Palembang

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.