Barangay Pedagogy: Teaching as a Collective Act

• In Event: The Impact of Ethnic Studies on Asian American and Pacific Islander Teacher Development

Abstract

In the spirit of barangay pedagogy, we wrote this paper as a collective act. Our purpose was to give our audience a sense of what it’s like to become a teacher with Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP). We wanted to provide a format where our readers could understand what it feels like to become part of the PEP community. Piecing together our 18 years of collective stories, research, observations, interviews, and interactions, we co-created a composite character that represents first-year teachers who enter into the PEP space with a set of expectations colored by their own personal educational experiences. We use “I” to represent the voice of the composite character, but in reality, it is not only meant to be one singular voice, but rather the character the collective “we.” Throughout the essay, we weave in themes indigenous to Filipinas/os to demonstrate ways in which this character develops and transforms.

Barangay Pedagogy applies Emily Lawsin’s “Bayanihan Spirit” in the classroom through the development of Barangay Building. The term barangay refers to the smallest political units in the Philippines; in essence, villages and/or communities. PEP aims to provide ways for teachers and students to transform the classroom into a community where they serve each other. The main pillars of PEP’s barangay pedagogy are:
Purpose: Katarungan (justice) and kalayaan (freedom)
Empathy: Pakikiramdam (shared feelings) and kagandahang-loob (shared humanity)
Praxis: Pakikipagkapwa (shared identity, struggle, survival) and pakikibaka (collective action)
This paper examines how PEP’s usage of barangay pedagogy within teacher development and instruction. To examine our research topic, we combined a case study approach with grounded theory to understand and make meaning of the experiences of PEP teachers as they learned, interrogated, and critically examined how barangay pedagogy can bring life to issues they face on a day to day basis in their community, with family, and in the classroom. Doing a case study on Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP) explores the details and meanings of experience and investigates a contemporary phenomenon within a real life context. (Merriam, 1988,Yin, 1994) We believe studying PEP as a phenomenon can bring out a holistic description and analysis of the experiences of the participants in the program. Because of our participation in the program, it allowed us to get a close to each subject and conduct direct observation in our natural setting. (Bromley, 1986)

The results of this study show how barangay pedagogy provides a means for decolonizing teacher education/training and critical leadership development by 1. engaging pedagogical practice and training through developing a relationship between critical content and teaching method; 2. challenging individualistic models of teacher internships through the creation of teacher apprentice communities; and 3. showing how an extended barangay/network of effective educators that participate in the training, support and maintenance of teacher education can reproduce more effective educators.

Author

• Arlene S. Daus-Magbual, San Francisco State University