The Plastic Bag Campaign That Backfired
A Sydney Year 11 Indonesian class runs a 'less plastic' campaign as a joint project with a partner school in Bandung. The Australian students design posters in Indonesian urging shoppers to refuse single-use plastic bags. The Bandung teacher replies politely that the message is well intentioned but that the campaign feels out of touch with local conditions: many shoppers reuse bags already, some warungs depend on cheap packaging, and the biggest local waste problem is not bags but uncollected rubbish and illegal dumping. She suggests the students visit a local initiative that pays residents in rice for sorted waste. The Australian students feel deflated; their teacher asks them to revise rather than abandon the project. They have two weeks and limited Indonesian.
1. Diagnose why the campaign missed its mark, and identify the assumptions the students brought to it.
Read the worked answer
The campaign missed because the students transferred an Australian framing of an environmental issue onto a different context without checking it. Their assumptions included:
- That plastic bags are the main waste problem locally, when the partner teacher identifies uncollected rubbish and dumping as more pressing.
- That shoppers are not already reusing bags, when many are.
- That a message aimed at individual consumer choice is the effective lever, when local solutions may be community- and incentive-based, such as the rice-for-sorted-waste scheme.
- That a poster in Indonesian is automatically culturally appropriate; language translation is not context translation.
The deeper issue is deficit thinking - the implicit idea that the partner community needs to be told what to do by outsiders. The appropriate stance is partnership: ask what the local priority is, then lend skills (design, English-language outreach, data presentation) to that priority rather than setting the agenda. This is the judgement the exam rewards: recognising that a well-meaning campaign can still be a misreading of context.
2. Propose a revised two-week plan that responds to the partner teacher's feedback and works within the students' limited Indonesian.
Read the worked answer
The plan should defer to the partner's priorities and play to the Australians' strengths.
Week 1:
- Send a short, humble reply in Indonesian thanking the teacher and asking her to choose between two options the students can realistically deliver: (a) materials supporting the rice-for-waste initiative, or (b) a bilingual explainer on sorting waste at home.
- Draft a simple questionnaire in Indonesian (checked by the teacher) to learn what local residents find difficult about sorting waste.
Week 2:
- Produce visual-led materials with short Indonesian text, since the students' Indonesian is limited: infographics on what counts as sorted waste, and posters celebrating existing reuse habits rather than scolding.
- Include the partner school's name and credit residents' practices, so the material reads as co-produced, not imposed.
- Present findings to both classes by video call.
Reasoning: the revision changes who sets the agenda and what medium suits the students' language level, which addresses the teacher's critique more than simply softening the wording of the original posters.