"Making Do" for the Future: Imagination, Work, and K–12 Reform in the Philippines

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Aspirations, Intentions, Values, and Imagination: Understanding Career and Academic Choices and Trajectories

Abstract

This ethnographic work in a public high school in the Cordillera Mountains, Northern Philippines looks into how young people experience and approach schooling in the context of “mobilities”, work, and recent K to 12 educational reform. In this paper, imagination, understood not as the cognitive and liminal phenomenon of fantasy, but as the unpredictable and inflective ways of consuming global/ local forces, is a heuristic handle used to capture the responses of students to schooling, work, and disadvantage. This paper argues that students approach these in relation to their futures not merely in binary terms as resignation/resistance or staying/leaving, but in quite novel ways that often include improvisation as well as flatness of emotion.

Author

• Elizer Jay Yague de los Reyes, The University of Melbourne