The Price of Beauty: assessing an environmental education program about traded songbirds in Indonesia

This paper assesses an environmental education program made to address the songbird trade in Southeast Asia, which is accelerating the extinction of 49 songbird species. The authors co-created this classroom-based program with local university students, bird-keepers, and teachers and tested it with 144 students at four senior high schools in the Special Region of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. We collected survey data before and after the program to measure normalized changes in student attitudes, knowledge, and behaviors. These results identified student populations with the greatest potential for effecting positive environmental change. Upper-middleclass students with bird-keeping experience showed the greatest positive change in environmental attitudes and behaviors. Female students engaged most extensively in environmentally friendly activities, and teachers influenced short-term environmental attitudes more than almost any other source including families. Normalized attitude and behavior changes were positively correlated but did not correlate with knowledge changes. These results reaffirm the role attitudes play in sparking environmental action, encouraging future investments in environmental education for women, and indicate potential links between bird-keeping and conservation. The results also spotlight the classroom as a laboratory for inspiring community-driven conservation, revealing pathways along which future educators can make positive impacts.