Perceptions of Indonesian Citizenship Teachers on Teaching Tolerance in Schools through Citizenship Education

This study examines the teacher's perception of teaching tolerance within citizenship education in Indonesia. It seeks to identify the teachers' opinion about the purpose of teaching tolerance, and the content knowledge and the teaching method used by citizenship teachers to educate students to be more tolerant. It adopts a mixed method design by combining quantitative and qualitative methods. As such, 103 online questionnaires were collected, using Qualtrics software and using a snowball sampling technique. In addition, ten teachers were interviewed using online telephone interviews to get more details about the reasons for supporting teaching tolerance using a convenience sampling technique. Descriptive statistic, frequency distribution and cross tabulation analysis, using SPSS, and coding method on NVivo were used to analyse the results of this research. The results indicate that there are three main reasons for teaching tolerance, which are: to let students make interreligious and inter-ethnic friendships; to prevent disruptive or violent behaviour in class; and to reduce discrimination among students who are of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. In order to achieve these goals and effectively teach tolerance within citizen education, human rights, a sense of personal identity and a sense of community involvement are suggested as appropriate content. Five teaching methods were identified which might be used to transfer tolerance values. These are using a controversial issue, introducing a case study about prejudice and discrimination, reading literature, drama and visiting minority communities. The implication of this study suggests teachers should use these content knowledge and teaching methods when they teach tolerance.