Enhancing students’ environmental concern of their cultural landscape heritage through STSE education approach

Our findings have established several useful points. First, the study demonstrated the effectiveness of STSE education in improving students' global and local environmental concerns. This was true mainly for the items with the greatest improvement (NEP 1 and LEP 1).

Students' experiences when observing various problems in paddy fields, and interviewing farmers during STSE's learning, appear to have changed their perspectives from disagreeing to agree with the statement that "the capacity of Earth and Subak are limited in supporting the human population growth", as intended on the NEP 1 and LEP 1. It highlights the statement of Sobel (2005) that local environment (such as the subak), repositioned STSE in more inclusive context to look all subject learning are interacting and shape each other. Prior studies found that grounded learning in a local context was effective to support students in understanding and valuing classroom discourses (Taptamat, 2011); ecological awareness (Reis & Roth, 2010); environmental problems as well as environmental solutions (Marouli, 2002);

We saw most students go further than just learning facts, concepts, and skills. They were creative in designing PP and PV and took collaborative action in data collection. They improved their communication via in-class presentations and developed critical thinking by reflecting on global and local consequences of human intervention during the discussion session. Ozaktas (2013) underlined the importance of students exploring who they are, what they want to be, and how they wish to relate to the local, global, and regional society to mobilize their strong feelings and self-identification. Our finding indicates "the presence of a holistic view of the human-environment relationship of the students from less industrialized countries" (Petegem & Blieck, 2006). This was supported by arguments from several students regarding NEP (and LEP) 6 and 14. They believe that humans must learn about nature as well as about the subak to guarantee that both resources are used sustainably. These are likely why both PP and PV approaches have helped students to improve their environmental perspectives. Several previous studies have also highlighted the ability of an environmental education program to increasing NEP scores (Rideout 2005; Manoli et al., 2007; and van Heezik et al., 2012).

Second, PV was more effective at changing students' environmental views than PP. It might provide more opportunities for students to explore and make connections with their outdoor experiences (Dhanapal & Lim, 2013). Furthermore, Leo (2005, p. 175) mentioned that PV is "an excellent medium for exploring potentially contentious personal and cultural values and beliefs from a non-threatening and often humorous perspective." Conversely, while PP is an important factor in helping its audience to easily understand content, improving the presentation of slides without adequate experience and awareness of the requirements of a well-designed and presented slideshow is difficult (Hayama & Kunifuji, 2012). According to Paoletti et al. (2012, p. 9), concise text or an outline of the main points that summarizes key information is "more useful than a presentation that paraphrases the linguistic form of the spoken message." However, based on our observation, nearly all groups from the PP class presented slides that contained redundant text reproduced verbatim from the speaker's oral message.

Third, by using the local cultural landscape heritage, this study might help develop students' personal affinity with the earth. This could be done via practical experience and by grounding learning in the sense of place via investigation of surrounding natural communities (Zandvliet, 2010). Today, the subak has been threatened by various problems and challenges such as rice paddy conversion and water scarcity due to massive tourism growth, development policy, environmental pollution, and the unwillingness of a younger generation to work in the farming system (Lorenzen & Lorenzen, 2010; Tharigan et al., 2014). All of this is coupled with parents' wishes that their children not farm for their livelihood (Fox, 2012). There are also exploitative attitudes and behaviors toward the environment because of the mechanistic or reductionist paradigm of modern science (Akib & Fathoni, 2014). To address these problems, significant efforts from many stakeholders are required including a new emphasis on ecosystem-based agriculture fostered by an ecosystem perspective in research (Lansing & Kremer, 2011) . Introducing students to community experience and practical skills in exploring and understanding NEP and LEP views might enable educators to introduce them to occupational alternatives that could preserve cultural heritages (Zandvliet, 2010). This also helps students to shift the holistic ecological paradigm to be more comprehensive and to prioritize the values of environmental justice (Akib & Fathoni, 2014). This will help maintain rituals and agricultural practices, prevent land conversion, and may even ensure the sufficiency of the future of farm labor for rice terraces (Salamanca et al., 2015).

Fourth, this data suggests that typical STSE education may have a meaningful impact on the developmental perspective of pro-environment views. However, more research is needed to determine the best educational methods for increasing pro-environmental views and the readiness of students for future ecological challenges (Rideout, 2014). The current study is limited by its small sample size. Thus, there is an urgent need for future studies with a more representative sample. This sample can re-confirm our finding of why the impact of STSE approaches toward LEP is higher than NEP. Our presumption is that the use of local issues is more accessible for students in understanding environmental issues; however, this needs to be proven in further research. We highlight Aikenhead's (2005) suggestion to conduct innovative STSE projects on a larger scale to include new partnerships among educators, researchers, and stakeholders to make a significant difference in the science classroom. It would also be interesting to verify whether the STSE approach is more effective than conventional teaching methods in comparing the effects of the two methodologies (Carrier et al., 2013). Finally, we suggest replicating this STSE approach in countries with diverse traditional wisdom to contrast and understand those populations' global and local environmental views.

Acknowledgment

This work was funded by the Ministry of Research, Technology and Higher Education of the Republic Indonesia. Sincerely thank the students for their enthusiastic participation and significant contribution to the data collection process.