Promoting International Freedom & Understanding in Indonesian Pesantren

From early 2010 till late 2011 Search for Common Ground, and P3M implemented the “Promoting International Freedom and Understanding in Indonesian Pesantrens” Project. During the two year life of the Pesantren Project religious freedom and tolerance in Indonesia has continued to endure persistent challenges from various elements of state and society. Many of these challenges have been violent and/or violated the rights of citizens, predominantly minority groups. This unfortunate persistence underlines the continuing need for initiatives, like this project, which aim to enhance common understanding and promote pluralism and religious freedom, especially among younger Indonesians.

This project has shown how a relatively small amount of resources can be mobilized in a short time period to make a significant impact, effectively improving the attitudes and understanding of young students. If such activities are scaled up and/or mainstreamed into local or national level state policy and practice then the challenge of reducing religious intolerance and violence in Indonesia can be universally addressed.

From early 2010 till late 2011 Search for Common Ground, and P3M implemented the “Promoting International Freedom and Understanding in Indonesian Pesantrens” Project. During the two year life of the Pesantren Project religious freedom and tolerance in Indonesia has continued to endure persistent challenges from various elements of state and society. Many of these challenges have been violent and/or violated the rights of citizens, predominantly minority groups. This unfortunate persistence underlines the continuing need for initiatives, like this project, which aim to enhance common understanding and promote pluralism and religious freedom, especially among younger Indonesians.

This project has shown how a relatively small amount of resources can be mobilized in a short time period to make a significant impact, effectively improving the attitudes and understanding of young students. If such activities are scaled up and/or mainstreamed into local or national level state policy and practice then the challenge of reducing religious intolerance and violence in Indonesia can be universally addressed.

An analysis of both the quantitative and qualitative information collected during this evaluation found that the project’s impact was in many aspects significant. The project produced quality materials that can be re-used in Indonesia and other locations. The reuse of the comic books and manuals is particularly important as disproportionately more project time was spent in producing these quality materials as was disseminating and facilitating the understanding them. A follow-up project would allow for more time to be spent utilizing these materials amongst a larger amount of beneficiaries, as less resources would be required to reproduce these materials.

Both the debating and comic book components of the project facilitated the useful exploration of religious tolerance and diversity within the target schools. The content of both components included the key issues of pluralism and tolerance that sparked discussion and the imagination of students and teachers. A questionnaire on student attitudes distributed at the start of the project had the same effect. The one shortfall of these materials is that they were underutilized with the debate manuals being produced late and the teachers only receiving minimal training in how to use the manuals to facilitate the learning process.

The project’s plausible contribution to behavioral change was admirably high with a quantitative survey revealing that the attitude and understanding of more than 7% of students improved during the course of the activities. For example:

• The number of students who believed that religious tolerance amongst the people was something to be grateful for rose from 85% to 93%;
• The number of students who congratulate other religious denominations on their respective holy day rose from 60% to 70%;
• The number of students who agreed that discussion in the classroom was very helpful in enabling the students to practice tolerance values rose from 65% to 78%;
• The number of debating students who thought their competency critical thinking rose from 15% to 41%.