Fun, ‘Family’, and Friends

ABSTRACT

This article explores a unique form of environmental education (EE) being implemented in schools in Surabaya, Indonesia. An environmental NGO (TENGO) and the national in-school programme, Adiwiyata, attract students to engage in pro-environment activities such as making compost and rehabilitating mangroves. Ethnographic research in and around high schools revealed that these activities entail a very deliberate construction of a group identity, which has at its heart the ethos of kekeluargaan (family-togetherness). Students join the club because of this feeling of belonging to a ‘family’ of friends and have a huge amount of fun doing environmental activities together. The article shows the affective appeal to young people: as a social club that runs physically engaging activities, the role of humour, and the transgressive appeal of ‘daring to be dirty’. The ‘learning by doing’ programme run by TENGO circumvents the institutional apathy and lack of capacity to implement formal EE in class. Although Surabaya is becoming ‘clean and green’, partly through the hard work of students, the activities neglect learning about complex, human–environment interactions, as in more conventional EE. So, is it environmental education, and will individuals continue ‘being green’ after they leave school?

KEYWORDS:

• Education for sustainability
• environmental education
• Indonesia
• Surabaya
• pro-environmental behaviour
• youth

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Danau Tanu is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and author of Growing up in transit: the politics of belonging at an international school (Berghahn Books 2018).

Lyn Parker is a Professor in Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia and an anthropologist who has specialised in the anthropology of Indonesia.

ORCID

Lyn Parker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2218-9919

Notes

1 Biopori are cylindrical holes, about 10 cm in diameter and 1 m in depth, dug in the soil, reinforced by a resin pipe 15–20 cm in length, and stuffed with dried leaves in order to improve water absorption, especially in cities where areas of bitumen and concrete are extensive.

2 Evaluation of the EE in senior high schools in Surabaya and Yogyakarta can be found in Prabawa-Sear (2018) and Parker and Prabawa-Sear (in press).

3 The Indonesian Minister for the Environment wrote: ‘We must acknowledge that our attention to and consciousness of environmental problems is still very low. This is caused by the fact that most people in Indonesian society have not yet awoken to a real perception of the environment’ (Kementerian 2004: ix) ‘[E]nvironmental values are not deeply embedded in [Indonesian] society’ (World Bank 2014).

4 With the exception of the name of the mayor of Surabaya, the names of schools, NGOs and individuals are pseudonyms to protect privacy in accordance with Human Research Ethics requirements.

5 See Introduction (Parker) of this special issue.

6 Now the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

7 Bu is short for Ibu, which is literally ‘mother’, but is a common way to address adult women.

8 See particularly Fionna (2017): 12–15.

9 TENGO is a long-lived NGO. It had a local energy supplier as a major sponsor, and another private sponsor which provided the house which accommodates TENGO’s office. It enjoyed a long relationship with another environmental NGO in Perth, Western Australia.

10 Tanu was employed as research associate by the project.

11 Literally ‘market raid’, but gerebek pasar or grebek pasar is also often used as a marketing term to refer to activities carried out to raise brand awareness.

12 Grade 10 is the first year of senior high school in Indonesia.

13 Jaim is a slang compound of two words, jaga – to mind, guard, be careful about, and imej – image.

14 Geertz (1959: 233) identified sungkan as a peculiarly Javanese emotion, and says it

refers to a feeling of respectful politeness before a superior or an unfamiliar equal, an attitude of constraint, a repression of one’s own impulses and desire, so as not to disturb the emotional equanimity of one who may be spiritually higher.

15 Field notes, 20 January 2015.

16 Field notes, 16 January 2015.

17 Students often did not distinguish leaves from mulch or compost. Leaves, mulch, compost and fertiliser were often considered interchangeable.

18 Field notes, 20 January 2015.

19 Field notes, 16 February 2015.

20 In 2013, 63.55% of boys aged 16–18, and 64.15% of girls, attend senior high school (Kementerian Pemberdayaan Perempuan dan Perlindungan Anak 2016: 37).

21 Field notes, 20 January 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, ‘Fostering Pro-Environment Consciousness and Practice: Environmentalism, Environmentality and Environmental Education in Indonesia’ (DP130100051).