An Analysis of Environmental Education in Indonesian EFL Elementary School Textbooks

The worsening global environmental crisis highlights the urgency of integrating Environmental Education (EE) throughout the curriculum including in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) curricula. However, challenges exist, such as the development of appropriate curriculum documents and educators' understanding of approaches to EE. This study looked at Indonesian EFL textbooks for elementary schools, focusing mainly on the images and how they can portray environmental themes. These images and some brief texts that accompany the images were examined using tools from ecolinguistics literature, including Stibbe's (2021) nine stories and the United Nations' EE objectives (UNESCO-UNEP, 1975). This study intends to fill a gap in the EE literature by analyzing images in elementary school textbooks in the specific context of Indonesia, generalizing the idea of EE to other contexts. Findings revealed that while some EE efforts were evident, the majority of the material leaned towards an anthropocentric (human centered) perspective, indicating a need for greater incorporation of insights from ecolinguistics to enhance the content. Moreover, in terms of EE objectives, the textbooks provided ecological knowledge but lacked emphasis on developing skills and encouraging student participation in solving environmental problems. Examples demonstrating the ability to evaluate and address environmental issues were also absent. Suggestions are made for future EE content in EFL materials.