Building social attitudes through positive culture and culturally responsive teaching at an elementary school

Abstract

Developing students’ social attitudes requires educational approaches that integrate school culture with culturally meaningful pedagogy. However, empirical evidence remains limited on how positive school culture and Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) interact through local wisdom to strengthen elementary students’ social attitudes within an integrated educational framework. This qualitative case study investigated how positive school culture is constructed, how CRT is implemented, and how their integration contributes to students’ social attitudes at SDN 1 Gedangdowo, Indonesia. Purposive sampling involved 27 participants, comprising the principal, six teachers, eighteen students, one school committee representative, and one community leader. Data were collected through classroom observations, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis and analyzed using the Miles, Huberman, and Saldaña interactive model supported by NVivo 12. The findings reveal that positive school culture was established through shared values, daily habituation, role modelling, restorative practices, and local wisdom, while CRT connected classroom learning with students’ cultural experiences and community knowledge. Their integration strengthened students’ respect, responsibility, cooperation, empathy, tolerance, and cultural awareness through consistent experiences across school routines and classroom instruction. For primary schools, these findings imply that character education can be strengthened by aligning school-wide cultural practices, classroom pedagogy, and local cultural resources to create consistent and meaningful opportunities for students to practise social values. Theoretically, the study contributes an integrated framework positioning positive school culture, CRT, and local wisdom as mutually reinforcing dimensions of a culturally grounded educational ecosystem for social attitude development.