Presentation short abstract

This paper examines how Sokola Rimba, a community-based education initiative among the indigenous Orang Rimba in Jambi, transforms literacy into advocacy, turning learning into resistance and ecological awareness amid development and conservation pressures.

Presentation long abstract

Since the 1970s, development and conservation projects in Jambi have transformed the living spaces of the Orang Rimba, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group whose livelihood and cosmology are deeply rooted in the forest. Much of their ancestral forest was converted into transmigrant settlements and oil palm plantations, while the remaining area was designated as a national park without their consent, threatening them with relocation. An alternative education initiative called Sokola Rimba (jungle school), developed collaboratively by the Sokola Institute and the Orang Rimba, emerged to address these challenges.

This paper situates the Orang Rimba’s struggle within a political ecology framework to explore how education becomes a medium of resistance and knowledge production. Learning begins with basic literacy and numeracy, evolving into a process of understanding ecological change and the power relations that shape it. Grounded in ethnographic engagement, Sokola teachers live with the community, use local languages and contextual vocabularies, and frame education from the Orang Rimba’s perspective.

Drawing on more than two decades of Sokola Rimba’s praxis, this paper offers an analytical reflection on how contextual education can foster critical consciousness and collective action. It demonstrates how learning practices rooted in everyday forest life enable indigenous hunter-gatherers to defend their rights to their living spaces, sustain local knowledge, and preserve ecological relations amid ongoing development and conservation pressures.