INTEGRATING CHARACTER BUILDING INTO TEACHING TO ENHANCE THE STUDENTS ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS

Abstract

Due to the growing environmental destruction, it is becoming nec- essary for people to start to care about the place they live. One way of doing this is through education by making the students aware of their environ- mental problems. However, the character education in Indonesia focuses more on improving the quality within and between individuals, and seems to neglect the characters, which shows relationship with environment. Creating students who are environmentally aware and able to take participa- tion to protect their environment basically helps them to posses good moral values. In short, possessing characters which signifies awareness to envi- ronmental problems and ability to protect the environment is as important as possessing desirable characters that can help students to succeed in live. This paper discusses about the characters building within Indonesian context, environmental education, language learning and environmental educa- tion, and some proposed models to integrate environmental education into teaching