Beyond Schools: Multisensory Learning and Knowledge Acquisition in Informal Contexts—Perspectives from Rural Indonesia

Abstract

It is not a new finding that much human learning takes place implicitly outside of educational institutions in informal, everyday contexts, yet these learning processes receive comparatively little systematic attention within the current anthropology of learning, education and schools. Based on long-term social anthropological research in a peasant community in rural Indonesia (Sulawesi), the article will address the complex multisensory forms of learning through which children acquire a large part of their competencies and their extensive environmental and agricultural knowledge. I will focus on the mixed-age “communities of practices” in which this knowledge is transmitted and acquired and show that affective bonds to peers and adults influence to a large extent which out-of-school areas of competence a child acquires. Building on the “embodied capital theory.” I argue that children in rural areas obtain a complex form of “ecological literacy” that encompasses not only a rich knowledge about the local ecosystems and agri- as well as horticultural processes but also a particular formation of the senses and the physical body in general (muscle size and memory, physical strength, coordination, balance, and motor skills). I shall conclude with some critical reflections on the general devaluation of the extra-curricular, non-formal, and environmental forms of learning, which can be observed not only in Indonesia but also worldwide and seems to be closely related to the global spread of Western psychological theory models about the healthy socio-emotional and cognitive development of children, supported by global institutions like UNICEF, World Bank, and Save the Children. For years, a constant increase of early childhood development programs can be observed, which aim at improving children’s school readiness, particularly in low-income countries, in order to enhance the future prospect of children. These programs, however, go hand in hand with the devaluation and oppression of indigenous knowledge systems and thus often worsen the future prospects of younger people.

Introduction

Let me begin with a small vignette, a look at the lives and careers of Baco (b. 1979) and Uci (b. 1983), whom I have known since their childhood days. Both possess a higher education degree (SMA) and come from land-rich Makassar peasant families in South Sulawesi. As young men, both of them worked at construction sites near the city of Makassar for different motives: Baco dreamed of a better life in the city at the time. He did not want to work as a rice farmer, and as a boy he only occasionally participated in agricultural tasks.

Uci, on the other hand, was always in the fields as a child and wanted very much to become a rice-cultivator, but he had to work in construction because there was not enough land left for him. His parents had sold a large part of their rice fields for the university studies of his 3 years older sister Marlina. However, despite having completed her teaching degree, Marlina has been unemployed at home for 10 years now. The rest of the remaining land is farmed by Uci’s older brother.

Both Uci and Baco were very unhappy with their lives after a short time and were looking for a way out of the situation. Both got married. Uci married the daughter of a peasant who had a lot of land and immediately gave up his wage job as a construction worker, cultivated the fields of his wife and in-laws and has led a contented life ever since.

Baco married a woman with no particular resources, remained employed in construction, and continued to lament his fate. In 2004, when he was 24 years old, I recorded the following conversation with him in my field notes:

I hate this work, I hate living in the city. I wish I could live in the Kampung (village) and work as petani (peasant)!

Why don’t you do it? Your parents have so many fields that you have to rent out in the meantime!

I can’t! I have neither the strength nor the knowledge, also I am too old.

At the time, I thought this remark was an excuse. However, I subsequently heard similar statements made again and again from peasants’ sons, who later regretted their decision not to work in the rice-fields. This prompted me to turn my attention to how the knowledge and skills important for wet rice cultivation and forest garden maintenance are acquired. I began to systematically observe how children acquire these skills and what or who motivates them to do so.

Methods

Methodically, I approached these questions on the one hand by accompanying children in their everyday activities outside of school (so-called go-alongs) and on the other hand by means of the PhotoVoice method. I gave small cameras to a group of 16 children (8 males, 8 females between 7 and 11 years) and asked them to take pictures of their everyday life: what they do beyond school, when, where, how, and with whom. I then printed these photographs and asked the children to explain them to me.

The PhotoVoice method gave me good insights into the children’s life worlds, in their daily activities beyond schools and served as a basis for my later go-alongs with various groups of children. The photos enabled me to identify fixed constellations of children, that is, to see which children often spent time together, given that these peer groups always appeared together in the pictures of the different child photographers. I then tried to join these groups after school, which worked out well. I was gladly taken along and usually even picked up. (I conducted this research in 2014, 2015, 2019, and 2022). This method merely served as an introduction to the children’s everyday worlds, their networks, and their main activities. Besides this, I conducted some “forest plot interviews” (Zarger, 2010; Zent, 1999) in order to access the botanical knowledge of the children: I asked different children to label the names of the plants growing in a particular forest garden plot. ¹ These “forest plot interviews” took place in a playful manner. Usually, I pointed at different plants and asked the children about their names and characteristics or I pretended to know nothing about the local flora by deliberately misnaming even the most important crops such as coffee, chocolate, coconut, banana trunks, and mango trees. The children loved this play. They acted as my teachers, showed me a lot of plants, and subjected me afterwards to tests of my knowledge.

The forest gardens form highly complex ecosystems in which wild and cultivated plants are arranged and maintained in such a way that the plants support each other, with other species also playing a role. In other words, working in and caring for forest gardens demands a complex knowledge about multispecies relations.

Go-Alongs

I would like to take you now to a go-along with Rijal and his two best friends. After school, Rijal sets off daily for his grandparents' forest garden, usually accompanied by his friends Jupri and Mutar on the 10-minute walk for the children—but 20-minute walk with me in tow. They jump right and left into the forest every now and then and return either with a fruit for direct consumption for all of us or with a bundle of spices, vegetables, or dug-up manioc tubers that they have been commissioned to harvest. Or they check the condition of certain crops cultivated in these forest gardens. Later, at home, they know how to give competent information about these plants. Since Rijal’s grandfather produces palm sugar, Rijal also checks the palm trees on the way. In a flash, he is up the palm tree and expertly looks at how much of the sugar juice has leaked out and how many full tubes can be removed. He then reports on this to his grandfather. All of this takes place at a fast pace, full of merriment and laughter; nevertheless, these are extremely helpful activities for the adults. How much responsibility and at the same time confidence in their abilities is granted to the children is also shown by the fact that the grandfather entrusts Rijal with the supervision of the cooking process of the palm sugar and uses the time to fetch the full sugar juice tubes that Rijal has told him about.

Even though the children are involved in important productive activities here, there is plenty of time for play. So, what is this all about? Work or play? Or playful working? I think this question is secondary or misleading. In my opinion, the focus here is on aspects of learning and competence building. Through these activities children acquire important knowledge and physical skills (see Chick, 2010). The adults, in this case the grandparents, accompany the children in these learning processes and guide them where necessary. They form “communities of practice” together with the children (Erickson & Espinoza, 2021).

What is significant in this context is that a large part of knowledge transfer and competence building takes place exclusively in groups of children. Usually, older children show the younger ones how to do something, and adults only give instructions when there are no older children around. In such mixed-age peer-communities, an important social skill is thus also transmitted: namely, the sensible and age-appropriate transfer of knowledge, which requires patient explanation and instruction. Children learn early on to be considerate of younger ones and to integrate them into their respective activities by looking for tasks that the younger ones can already contribute. The younger children are never asked to leave or not to participate because they cannot do something yet. If older children do react from time to time annoyed to the younger ones, they are immediately scolded by the adults present. In short, already very young children (2–3 years of age) are part of the mixed-age communities of practice, which offer the younger ones many guided early learning opportunities. The physical, cognitive, and social development of young children is nurtured in a variety of ways through their integration into these mixed-age groups. In the Makassar context like in many other societies, the fostering of (young) children is by no means the responsibility of the parents alone, but shared between many shoulders. ²

What seems important to me is that Makassar children can acquire their extracurricular knowledge in a playful manner, without any pressure. The adults teach and explain depending on the respective child’s interest. Children are neither pushed to learn certain skills nor forced to come to the fields or gardens. If they wish to do so, they are willingly taken along and allowed to learn by “observing and pitching in,” as Paradise and Rogoff (2009) call it. In other words, playful “go-alongs” with adults or older children constitute a wide-spread mode of knowledge transmission and “enskinment” (Ingold, 2000).

The ecological and agricultural knowledge that children acquire in this way is impressive. Rijal and his friends, who were between 8 and 10 years old, knew countless plants, in fact nearly all of the ones I pointed out during our forest garden tours. They were able to name all edible plants and, in the case of many non-edible plants, to state their respective uses, for example, that a certain plant is placed on bleeding wounds, another is used for itching, etc. Likewise, they knew which plants to avoid. ³ The children, on the other hand, who rarely visited the gardens, were usually only able to identify the most important crops, such as mango trees, coconut palms, bananas, and coffee bushes growing within a particular forest garden plot.

In a similar way, children obtain the complex knowledge and skills related to rice cultivation. Here, too, interest is supported as soon as children show it. For example, they are given small practice fields for planting and terracing, and materials to build farm tools. They are involved in planting as well as harvesting and threshing the rice and in each case along gender-specific division of tasks. Women are responsible for raising and planting rice, which involves a great deal of breeding knowledge, and men are responsible for building terraces and plowing with cattle teams or now since a few years with motor plows.

The conventional way of rice cultivation and horticulture in South Sulawesi requires physical strength in men, for example, for terrace construction and plowing, which until recently also included experience in handling teams (human–animal relations) and physical endurance in women (planting, harvesting). Both genders need appropriately trained senses for their tasks: for example, a “feeling” for the soil conditions, that is a sensory ability to determine whether the soil is too soft or too hard and dense for the construction of the rice terraces. This ability to sense soil conditions is acquired by boys from childhood onwards through helping with terrace construction under the guidance of experienced elders. For girls, it is also necessary to develop a sense for soil conditions. This is extremely important for the cultivation of rice plants—which is a female task—as well as for the planting process itself, in which it is important to place the seedlings with their fine root system undamaged in the flooded fields. This activity requires dexterity as well as extreme physical endurance. According to the women, planting the young rice is the most demanding of all the field work, particularly transferring the seedlings from the cultivation beds into the fields, which requires beating out the soil from the roots at the calves, before carefully placing them in the fields. Untrained women do not last long in this work, which involves standing bent over in the water for hours on end (see Rössler, 1997, p. 460). Girls also develop these sensorial and physical strength through accompanying and helping the female planters.

Embodied Capital

Following Kaplan and Bock (2001), I understand these physical, sensory abilities as embodied capital that is acquired and built from infancy on in complex feedback loops between physical and cognitive child development. The anthropologist John Bock differentiates between growth-based embodied capital, such as physical strength, coordination, muscle memory, and size, and those that increases with experiences, or experience-based embodied capital, particularly cognitive functions, memory, task-specific skills, learned knowledge, endurance, and specific coordination (Bock, 2010, p. 20; Bock & Johnson, 2004, p. 66; see also Bock, 2002; Kaplan & Bock, 2001). Both forms interact closely in the development and acquisition of skills and knowledge. Highly interesting here are the experimental studies of Bock (2002) in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, which show that girls, who are involved in grain pounding activities from an early age are already as productive as adult women at the age of 14, whereas boys of the same age proved to be extremely unproductive at pounding despite their greater physical strength. The notion of embodied capital points to the fact that knowledge acquisition is always linked to practical experience and thus to the senses.

From the perspective of embodied capital theory, Baco’s statement that he could not work as a rice-cultivator becomes understandable, as he had neither the particular physical skills (despite his general physical fitness as a construction worker) nor the necessary knowledge to do so. Uci, on the other hand, who had acquired these specific skills from childhood on, had the embodied capital necessary to successfully switch to agricultural work. In other words, the embodied capital is the product of a multisensory learning process starting in early childhood that shapes and integrates the senses into a particular mode of intersensoriality (Howes, 2005, pp. 7–12). ⁴ The cognitive, sensory, and muscular skills required to become a good rice farmer and horticulturalist are the result of complex, situated learning and training processes that begin in childhood and are mainly based on observation and age-appropriate practice.

This also becomes evident in Éva Hölzle’s work on the betel cultivating War Khassi in Bangladesh. War Khassi agroforesters emphasize that the balance and muscle strength necessary for climbing the trees in order to care for the betel (which creeps up trees) can only be acquired if trained from childhood onwards (Hölzle, 2023, p. 163). The complex knowledge about the cultivation of betel, which not only includes knowledge about good soil conditions, multispecies relations, light and shade conditions in the forest as well as growth cycles and correct timing and much more, is also the result of lengthy learning processes starting in childhood (Hölzle, 2023, p. 164). Like in Makassar, War Khassi children learn mainly by “observing and pitching in.” Learning by doing is more important than learning by verbal instruction. Adults merely provide context-related advice, correct or support children’s activities by showing how to do certain tasks correctly. Physical proximity between learners and teachers is highly important in this context: Children learn side by side with more experienced ones—be they older children or adults. This allows a close monitoring of the children’s actions and quick intervention if necessary, which in turn makes it possible to entrust the children with more difficult tasks. To sum up, acquiring embodied capital is a social relational process grounded in concrete contexts of activity: novices develop specific skills, sensibilities, and muscular dispositions by accompanying, observing, and helping older experts (Hölzle, 2023, p. 165;; Lauer & Aswani, 2009, p. 329; Maynard & Tovote, 2010, p. 195).

It is important to stress that the complex ecologically knowledge passed on from one generation to the next as embodied capital in “communities of practice,” is a highly flexible one. It is constantly being transformed and adapted to new challenges in the face of environmental changes, socioeconomic transformations (intensification of agriculture through the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and technological innovations (motor ploughs, harvesting machines).

Affective Communities of Practice

Let me turn briefly to the question of what motivates some children to acquire this agricultural and horticultural knowledge and prevents others from doing so. My thesis is that this is very closely related to children’s affective ties, both to adults and especially to peers. In the Makassar context, children’s peer groups usually associate with one or more adults, whom they often accompany in their activities. Thus, they form communities of practice centering around productive tasks these adults are fulfilling—as the example of Rijal illustrated. Rijal is closely attached to his grandparents and very often motivates his two best friends, Jupri and Mutar, to accompany him. But often the three boys also accompany the elder brother of Jupri, who is very skilled in fishing and takes care of a fish pond. Mutar on the other hand sometimes convinces his friends to come with him to the workplace of his oldest brother, Ramli, who—besides cultivating his rice-fields—repairs motorcycles and motor plows in a small garage in the village. Ramli, in turn, “followed” (ikut) as a child one of his uncles to whom he was closely attached. This uncle ran a repair shop in nearby small town and thus Ramli gained his technical skills. The word ikut (follow) has a special meaning in the Indonesian context: to follow a person in his or her daily activities always means to acquire the person’s particular skills and knowledge. It points to a kind of apprenticeship. Through their constant move across overlapping communities of practice children get insights into different forms of adult activities. However, a large part of the competencies children acquire in their daily interaction is within their mixed-age peer-groups, that is, without any direct supervision and guidance of adults (Lancy, 1996; Maynard & Tovote, 2010). It is important to emphasize once again the permissive attitude of Makassar adults, who grant children a considerable right of self-determination and self-determined learning, thus enable them to associate with and ikut relatives they are particularly fond of.

Ecological Literacy

When my husband and I began our research in Sulawesi in the 1980s, subsistence agriculture was prevalent (see Rössler, 1997), that is, most of the activities in which children could participate were agricultural in nature. This has changed in the meantime: more and more people earn their living outside agriculture, or do it only as a sideline, but rice cultivation and horticulture are still central components of the local economy and thus of the children’s life worlds.

The proficiency obtained by children in informal learning situations in rice-fields and forest gardens includes not only an extensive ecological knowledge but also a wide-ranging shaping of the senses and bodily capacities (see also Zarger, 2002, 2010). This multisensory knowledge is not yet recognized as a form of education (Bildung). For future sustainable agriculture based on the experience of generations and optimally adapted to local ecological conditions, it may become important to recognize these forms of knowledge as a highly valuable forms of “ecological literacy” and to pay more attention to them. The term “ecological literacy” emerged in the fields of ecology and environmental education. It refers to the “(. . .) key ecological knowledge necessary for informed decision making, acquired through scientific inquiry and systems thinking” (McBride et al., 2013, p. 3). Like the related terms “ecoliteracy” and “environmental literacy,” it constitutes a pedagogical concept applying to environmental education. ⁵ I use the term “ecological literacy” here in a broader sense to express that this knowledge acquired by children in informal contexts represents a form of literacy that enables them to read their natural environment, that is, to perceive it with all senses and to navigate competently through and interact with it. I thus tie in with an expanded understanding of the concept of literacy, which is no longer limited to the ability to read and write, but is generally thought of as knowledge or capability in specific fields, which is also reflected in relevant dictionaries such as Cambridge or Oxford Dictionary. ⁶ However, ecological literacy in the sense proposed here is not acquired at schools. On the contrary, it stands in sharp contrast to the highly structured, formal, and decontextualized forms of knowledge transmission at schools which are primarily based on verbal instructions, individual exercises (homework), and physically distant teacher–student relations (frontal teaching). These teaching techniques constitute a “sensory regime” that primarily emphasizes vision and audition (Landahl, 2011) and neglects the other senses. ⁷

Conclusion

The question, however, is how long such forms of ecological literacy as a kind of multisensory knowledge will endure in the face of the global spread of competency models that emphasize formal schooling and its particular learning strategies and devalue informal, context-bound ways of learning by “observing and pitching in” or do not even recognize them as forms of education (or Bildung).

The risk that the complex, multisensory ecological knowledge generated over generations and passed on as embodied capital in “communities of practice” will lose its significance is accelerated in Indonesia by different factors, above all by the devaluation of agriculture as a third-class, low-level occupation. If one asks peasants in rural areas about their work, a frequent answer is: “tidak ada pekerjaan—petani saja.” (I have no profession—I’m just a peasant). Only wage labor or salaried employment with a fixed salary is considered as professional work, while everything else is not. Accordingly, many also enter “none” on their identity cards (kartu identitas) under the heading “profession.” This devaluation of agriculture causes many parents to prevent their children from following (ikut) them into fields and gardens and become their successors. The negative image of peasant work also motivates many young people to seek a livelihood elsewhere—even if the much-invoked economic success via higher education very often proves to be an illusion—as the aforementioned prototypical case of Uci’s older sister Marlina illustrates.

The widespread marginalization of local forms of knowledge and learning becomes also evident in the rapid proliferation of pre-schools as well as parenting intervention programs that are launched by developmental agencies and NGOs in order to encourage parents to adopt certain modes of education oriented toward Western middle-class standards and promote schooling as the non-plus-ultra for adequate development of children’s cognitive abilities. The Nurturing Care Framework (NCF) founded in 2018 by WHO, UNICEF, and the World Bank (see report WHO et al., 2018) is the newest and most far-reaching of these programs. It constitutes a roadmap for the global implementation of policies and intervention programs aiming at teaching parents around the world to engage in Nurturing Care—a set of allegedly optimal childrearing practices. The underlying premise is that poverty and disadvantage are caused and perpetuated by poor parenting, resulting in poor developmental outcomes in the next generation. The promise is that Nurturing Care will boost brain development (see WHO et al., 2018) in early childhood, which in turn will lead to higher school achievement and adult productivity and in the end, less welfare-dependency. A broad application of the NCF is expected to foster sustainable economic and societal development, especially in so-called low- and middle-income countries. ⁸

This is not to deny that children in many parts of the world are living in problematic circumstances and have only poor developmental conditions, but the raw and unreflective Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) standards-based measures with which the NCF operates risk failing are to recognize the highly complex local forms of knowledge acquisition and cognitive development. ⁹

By focusing exclusively on parental behavior, the creators and agents of the NCF overlook the complex ways in which child development is fostered in societies with multiple caregiving systems. They ignore that such culturally diverse forms of “nurturing care” are adapted to local needs. Moreover, these programs overlook the importance of the multisensory forms of learning and the complex embodied capital they generate. However, the one-sided forms of school learning that address only a few senses—mainly visual and auditory—are already being questioned in a few developmental studies. These show that multisensory learning that addresses all the senses leads to more robust learning outcomes (see e.g., Broadbent et al., 2018).

Due to the increasing global advertising and dissemination of pre-school programs and parenting interventions, which are oriented toward educational models and pedagogical ideals of Euro-American societies, local forms of teaching and learning such as those described here, which are well documented in social anthropology, are being marginalized.

This aspect carries far-reaching significance in that (higher) school education by no means automatically leads to better living conditions, as is often propagated by the NCF and other ECD programs. This is due to the fact that in many countries—including Indonesia—there are no adequate further education opportunities for graduates with higher school qualifications. Accordingly, the investment in higher education for children proves to be problematic for many peasant families in two respects: on the one hand, the aspirations for economic success promoted by the state’s education policy fails to materialize. A large proportion of graduates with middle or high school education work in casual jobs or try to survive as small entrepreneurs. On the other hand, this means that there is a lack of young people qualified for agriculture; the parents’ generation often lacks the necessary manpower to cultivate the fields and is forced to rent them out, unless a large part of the land has already been sold for the children’s school education, which in Indonesia is associated with considerable costs. In such cases, school education does not lead families out of poverty, but into it.

NCF and related organizations should therefore pay more attention to local forms of knowledge and knowledge transmission and the diverse ways in which children from early age on learn their environment, the biophysical (natural) as well as the social one. In this context, it could be promising for ECD agents to take into account the manifold Indigenous education movements emerging around the globe that reject Western models and are committed to implementing Indigenous schools that are adapted in their curricula and teaching methods to the respective local requirements and cultural traditions. ¹⁰ The majority of these schools focus on environmental learning; thus, these Indigenous education movements constitute important resources for the active protection and maintenance of local forms of knowledge that might become highly significant for the future of our planet.