Character Education Strategy Through Integrated Islamic Religious Education in Junior High Schools in Banyumas Regency

Purpose: Shaping the students' morality and virtous character is one of the objectives of education. Character education as an aspect that enriches religious education is aimed atdeveloping students' values, attitudes, and behaviors which reflects virtous morality. This is in accordance with the most essential objective of Islamic religious education that is to educatestudents with noble and perfect character as the soul of the Islamic religious education is thecharacter education.Method: This is a descriptive qulitative research which aims at describing the integration of religious Islamic education with other school subjects, school cutlture, and extracurricular activities. Observation, interview, questionnaires, as well as documentation were used in the research.Findings: The result of the research showed that positive values, attitudes, and behaviors, such as honesty, hospitality, trustworthiness, optimism, as well as avoiding negative behaviors, such as lying, lavishness, and enviousness, were parts of the characters covered in the religious education. In addition, the teaching learning process should be supported by the environmental factors to achieve its goal. The environmental factors could include the school culture as well as extracurricular activities. When the moral values in the religious education were integrated with other school subjects, school culture, and supporting extracurricular activities, the students virtous characters and attitudes would be positively affected. Islamic Religous Education (PAI)as one of the subjects taught at schools have similarities with Civic Education (PKn). The similarities could be described with the character values aimed to achieve.Several religious values in the Islamic religious education are praying before and after lesson, showing tolerance to believers of other religions, respecting others doing religious activities, praying for sick friends. Meanwhile, the religious character covered in the civic education, among others, are smiling, greeting, being polite, praying, praying for sick friends, showing tolerance, and doing religious activities well.The integrated model allowed students to learn the knowledge and skills wholistically. Hence, the teaching and learning process would be more meaningful for the students. Beside the integration of the religious education with the civic education, the shaping of values at school relied heavily on the school cultures, and school activities as a media to shape personal values, both in term of religiosity as well as nationalism