Teachers’ Beliefs and Perceptions of Integration and Elicitation of Human Values in Water Education in Some Southeast Asian Countries

Asian countries and other nations are developing new strategies for improving water quality. This paperproposes a model, Human Values Integrated Instructional model, that has the potential to make significant changes to existing conflicts over water, environmental degradation, and social inequity. This model is used for education in human values in mainstream school subjects, and human values based water, sanitation and hygiene education (HVWSHE) including environmental education, in parts of Southeast Asia. This paper presents teachers’ beliefs regarding the integration and the elicitation of human values in water, sanitation,and hygiene education in some Southeast Asian countries in 2009. A mixed method was used to investigate teachers’ beliefs through questionnaire administration and indepth interviews. Teachers surveyed were from Indonesia, Thailand and Lao PDR, while teachers interviewed were from Thailand and Indonesia. Data analysis includes descriptive and qualitative analysis for the questionnaire and qualitative coding procedures for the interviews.The results reveal that the teachers believed that the selected principles of integrating and eliciting human values in the lessons could have a positive impact on students’ ethical attitudes and behaviours, but only if teachers use student -centred methods in their teaching approaches and they incorporate both affective and cognitive domains in their teaching. Teachers from one of the samples need more support and teacher modelling to have a better conceptual understanding of HVWSHE.