Students’ Insights on Teaching Air Pollution in Indonesian Classrooms: A Report Based from Semi-Structured Interviews

Abstract

This qualitative study based on grounded theory was conducted among 49 active student leaders of Indonesia to determine how students perceived the situation of environmental education in their senior high schools and how the issue of air pollution are tackled in their conservative classrooms. The responses from semi structured interviews were specifically coded using the principle of open, axial, and selective coding and the content were systematically categorized, compared, and summarize to explicitly elicit the context of students’ general perceptions. Indonesian students acknowledge: (i) worsening situation of air quality brought by the combination of anthropogenic and natural causes, (ii) social media platforms to be the major available source of information and (iii) issues about air pollution are urgently needed to be address through innovations in the current environmental education system of the country by incorporating a curriculum emphasizing the concepts of sustainability.