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The Covid-19 pandemic presented educators and students worldwide with unforeseen challenges: Teachers needed to ensure continued delivery of quality education despite different student needs, including socio-emotional well-being, and varying access to the internet and digital devices. For students, it was important to keep connected to their teachers and classmates and that lessons remained engaging even if held online. At the Public Senior High School 19 in Tangerang in Indonesia biology teacher Upi Fitriani took up these challenges and created a new way of bringing her students together and her subject matter across.

“I will call it the Eco-Friendly Project” decided Teacher Upi Fitriani when she programmed a website for students to learn and take action on climate change, water, energy, and food security. She built the website content on Indonesia’s core curriculum and UNESCO resources, allowing students to access different topical information, complete tasks and document their actions. For example, to apply their newly gained knowledge in the area of water security, students are asked to clean up a river, inform their community about conserving water, or to start a social media campaign on using water sustainably. The project has allowed students to learn about different aspects of climate change and motivated them to take action. Student Bias Danang Ahmadi: “I realized through this project that climate change is real and humans have a critical role in minimizing the impact of climate change itself.”

Teacher Fitriani complements students autonomous work on the website with regular online meetings in small groups to exchange knowledge, experiences and give each other feedback, especially related to their community-based action projects.  “Students can choose a specific issue or problem to tackle in their local community,” teacher Fitriani explains and student Danang underlines “I usually learned biology concepts in the classroom, but through the Eco-Friendly Project I was able to explore the environment around me, and it was fun.” Furthermore, through the project-based approach, students see the application of the information directly and experience self-actualization. This action-centered approach also led to the students taking their learning experience further as student Ahmadi describes: “The project encourages me to reduce plastic consumption and apply the ‘reuse and recycle’ concept in daily life. I am also more confident to encourage my parents, my brother, my sister, and my friends to take part in this action.”

The project has also allowed students to explore and work with online tools. This is an important skill as teacher Fitriani emphasizes: “The digital world is a part of our world, especially for students nowadays.” She encourages her students to be creative and to develop “21st century skills, including critical thinking and problem solving, creativity and innovation, communication, and collaboration.” She explains how she turned one of the difficulties created by the Covid-19 pandemic into a learning opportunity: “In the normal conditions, I directly guide the students, I help them with the activity, but in online learning I try to focus on the group activities. The basic foundation of the project is collaboration.” Despite the different challenges she encounters, teacher Fitriani is motivated by the students’ reactions to continue her project: “It is a blessing when you see the smiles from the students and they say: ‘Wow this is good, this is a new way to learn!’ This is something that supports me.” Mrs Fitriani is currently planning to develop the project further and to apply it to other subjects.