On 07 August 2024, at the SHEEP Indonesia Foundation Office (YSI) held a Capacity Building facilitated by Ms. Theresia Novi Poespita Candra, S.Psi., M.Si., Ph.D., a Psychology Lecturer, Gajah Mada University (UGM) with the theme ‘Child Development and Assistance’. The activity attended by 17 YSI staff was interesting because staff gained an understanding of the stages of Child Development based on age groups, mentoring strategies, and mentoring children within the framework of organising in the Climate Justice and Protection of Children's Rights (KIPHA) project.
Facilitators who have experience teaching in schools provide mentoring strategies through the ‘Fun school movement’. This approach also addresses the problems experienced by students in schools and the shortcomings of the teaching system in Indonesia. There are six main crises that prevent students from learning well at school; these crises are environmental, social, spiritual, learning, ethical, and identity. In addition, in the Indonesian learning system, teachers are still more concerned with the delivery of material rather than the conditions and what their students face in real life.
In response to the problems at the school, staff introduced factors to build connections with students called ‘meters’. One of the most important ‘meters’ is the dialogue factor, because through dialogue staff can get to know and understand the students better. Another important factor is to build self-awareness in the students, so that they can be triggered to take action on the problems that occur.
In building self-awareness there are 4 stages, the first is ‘threat’ where students are shown the existing problems directly so that they are moved emotionally, second ‘hope’ where students are asked to build their hopes for the problems they see, third ‘confidence’ where students are directed to be confident in making changes to the existing problems, and finally ‘opportunities’ where students are guided to campaign for the problem and solution to the outside community.
Participants also need a teaching method that suits the ‘meters’ factor, so this programme introduces the ‘Circle of Time’ learning concept. This learning concept introduces 4 stages of learning, namely: 1) Provocation, which is showing how the problem can occur and who caused it, 2) Discussion and modelling, which invites discussion on how they feel about the problem, 3) Role play or practice is inviting to think what their future actions will be in overcoming the problem, 4) Reflection is inviting to reflect and build self-awareness to dare to take action to overcome these problems.
From the ‘Fun School Movement’ activities, staff then understand about child development in schools, including various factors that affect children's changes through the main crisis of children who cannot learn at school. In addition, through the learning concept of ‘Circle of time’, staff can develop more contextualised strategies and models of organising in the Climate justice project for the protection of children's rights. Thus children can have self-awareness to care about climate change that is happening on earth through age-appropriate methods and a fun atmosphere.