Multimodal Verbal Representations of Environmental Pollution: How Students Construct Meaning through Local Wisdom

Understanding environmental pollution and ecosystem degradation requires students not only to recognise environmental phenomena but also to articulate causal relationships through coherent scientific explanations. However, many students struggle to translate visual, graphical, and contextual information into structured verbal representations, limiting their ability to construct meaningful environmental concepts. While contextual and local wisdom–based learning has increasingly been promoted in science education, empirical evidence on how students develop verbal representations of environmental concepts within an ethnoecological framework remains limited. Addressing this gap, the present study investigates the initial profile of students’ verbal representation skills in constructing knowledge of environmental pollution and damage through an ethnoecological learning perspective. A qualitative descriptive design was employed involving 20 tenth-grade students from SMAN 16 Surabaya selected through purposive sampling. Data were collected using a verbal representation test designed to measure three indicators: abstraction, relation, and extension across multiple representation types, including visual–verbal, verbal–verbal, graphic–verbal, and mathematical–verbal forms. The findings indicate that students demonstrate the highest achievement in abstraction through visual–verbal representation (100%) and relatively strong performance in verbal–verbal abstraction (84%), suggesting that visual scaffolding effectively supports conceptual explanation. Conversely, lower performance in graphic–verbal tasks indicates difficulties in interpreting data relationships and expressing them through systematic verbal reasoning. These results highlight the critical role of multimodal representation in facilitating conceptual construction within environmental learning contexts. This study contributes novel empirical insight into students’ verbal representation profiles within ethnoecology-based environmental education and provides pedagogical implications for designing multimodal, context-responsive learning strategies that strengthen scientific communication and environmental literacy in secondary education.