Nilai Moral dalam Kumpulan Cerpen Bu Guru Cantik dan Relevansinya terhadap Pembelajaran Apresiasi Sastra di SMP

Moral values are urgently needed today to address the negative behavior of children and adolescents in their surrounding environment. These moral values include honesty, justice, courage, awareness, and wisdom. This study aims to identify the types of moral values, their underlying principles, and the benefits of the research findings for junior high school students, as reflected in the short story collection Bu Guru Cantik by Hasta Indriyani. This research employs a descriptive qualitative method.
The researcher acts as the main instrument (human instrument) and collects data through document analysis, focusing on words and sentences in the short stories that are relevant to the research questions. The data were analyzed descriptively to uncover the elements of moral values.1) The types of moral values found include sympathetic morality (empathy), morality of social goodness, morality of self-respect, and morality of personal virtue. These values reflect how individuals think, feel, and act ethically. 2) The principles of moral values discussed include morality based on feelings and emotions, the role of sympathy in morality, the relationship between morality and social well-being, and the manifestation of morality in the form of empathy, social goodness, self-respect, as well as personal virtues such as honesty and justice. 3) The application of moral values in Indonesian language learning through literary appreciation plays an important role in shaping students’ character.
Language learning not only develops communication skills but also serves as a medium to instill ethics, strengthen empathy, and build a positive personality in social interactions. There are 30 relevant quotations from the short stories that contain moral values aligned with the research questions. Therefore, the moral values in Bu Guru Cantik by Hasta Indriyani are relevant and applicable for literary appreciation learning at the junior high school level.