Pi Villaraza

Teachers in all levels hold responsibilities for facilitating conversation alongside the parents of young children. Their common work is to ensure that healthy linguistic environments exist to provide young learners the chance to express their minds, while also listening deeply to the meanings unfolding through their exploratory expressions.

Vanuatu is regarded one of the world’s most intact primal cultures, a generation shy from cannibalism and other ways that maintain what life must have been like for our hunter-gathering ancestors.

At first glance, it might seem - the young Filipino student is the world’s most disabled reader, coming from our current standing in global assessment.  This is the first time the Philippines joins PISA. Out of seventy-nine participating countries, we placed last in the comprehension of the English language in its written form. One might think we had enough chances to reach an average proficiency in a language that pervades the thinking processes of one of the largest English-speaking nations on Earth.

School classrooms in most countries have been one of the most easily affected in the modern pandemic’s wake, a global tsunami that has the power to reshape the way we live, how we move around and how we think.

“The Department of Education (DepEd) is at a crucial junction in its history. Long used to deliver its services through face-to-face interactions in the classroom, the COVID-19 public health emergency has forced it to consider and deploy multiple learning delivery modalities including online distance learning in a very short period of time.”

Throughout its long history, the western school freely crisscrosses the bridge spanning its modernity and structuralism and then its post-modernism and post-structuralism. Its experimental dance traversing the sciences and the humanities offers reflexive criticisms on the systems it had weaved unto its own meta-narratives and wreaked upon the cultures it had conquered.

I co-authored a book with Dr. Romy entitled Transformation Medicine, republished in Malaysia in 2015 based on its simple yet clear message.

“What does your culture offer to a post-COVID-19 world? What needs to be integrated and brought together from your context to create the change that is needed for Earth, humanity and all life to thrive?”

Alternative schooling systems include homeschooling, unschooling, world schooling, democratic schools, Waldorf education, eco-schools, to mention just a few non-traditional pedagogic movements that run outside the conventional learning experiences most children undergo.

In the last months, the vehicle leaves the ecovillage early in the morning, driven by a volunteer to a far-away purok hall where a village leader stands astride a mountain of sacks stuffed with organic material awaiting to be picked up.

Overnight, an empty field became a spontaneous meeting ground for twenty-six families interested in the idea of creating many smaller gardens within a one garden, each small part unique to the family’s style in fertilization techniques, companion planting, heat protection, and so on. In this socio-ecologial experiment, the one rule was there are no mistakes or errors. Everyone is free to create an expression of growth and hope.

I am writing this now as a friend from Ireland is outside this room in an intense process of giving birth to a baby girl in a pool of water inside this rented house in Casuy Road, Barangay Santa Monica.