Engineering students' voices on the inclusion of the Indigenous tuping (shear wall) of pappayao (rice terraces) in STEAM/STEM

• In Event: Indigenous Identities: Limits and Possibilities

Proposal

Interestingly, 2009-2019 was favorable and fruitful for Indigenous Knowledges (IK) in the Philippine education system. For instance, the Department of Education (DepEd) launched the Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTBMLE) in 2009 and Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) policy and curriculum frameworks in 2011 and 2015 respectively. Meanwhile, the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) issued Integration of IPEd or Indigenous Studies (IS) into Relevant Higher Education Curricula in 2019. A global health pandemic was declared in 2020, and schooling was disrupted. The physical distance requirement of various community quarantine or alert levels resulted in the unprecedented shift to distance, online, remote, or virtual learning. Operations were limited within the locality. Curricula or course guides are dynamic. These have been revised since 2020; hence, co-designing or negotiating these is emphasized. A negotiated curriculum is characterized by (1) learners becoming more autonomous and self-directed, (2) curriculum being developed and redesigned based on the needs of the learners, (3) educators becoming independent of textbooks and prescribed syllabi, and (4) recognizing curriculum design as a constitutive and iterative process.

Generally, this presentation investigated what engineering students negotiate or have to say about the inclusion of the Indigenous tuping (shear wall) of the pappayao (rice terraces), mainly in North Luzon, Philippines, into Science, Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, and Mathematics (STEAM or STEM). Specifically, it (1) introduces engineering concepts or topics that can explore and enhance tuping, (2) suggests pedagogical strategies that can optimize the learning and teaching of such concepts, and (3) lists issues confronting tuping in rigidly designed academic programs or curricula.

Further, this study contributes to the discourse on IK being the foundation of not only basic but also higher education in the Philippines. Kto12, which is a decade-long initiative and currently challenged, uses the slogans “Kto12 is IPEd; IPEd is Kto12” and “The ancestral domain is my classroom”. There is diversity and depth of knowledge that can be explored through the tuping. Moreover, this coincides with 2019 being International Year of Indigenous Languages and 2022-2032 being International Decade of Indigenous Languages. The conceptualization, construction, and contestation of IK are captured largely in Indigenous languages or mother tongues. To add, it celebrates the United Nations new social contract for education, which was released in 2021. It states reimagining the futures of education and repairing the inequities and injustices of the past. In terms of curriculum development or redesign, such contract reviews (1) what should be retained or sustained, (2) what should be removed or eliminated, and (3) what should be recreated or refreshed. It also recommends certain elements or topics in any academic course: (1) climate change (environmental sustainability); (2) care and cooperation (social and emotional learning), (3) communication in various languages (multilingualism/plurilingualism), (4) computing and calculating (financial literacy and numeracy), (5) culture (history and humanities), (6) critical thinking (scientific inquiry and investigation), (7) connected technologies (digital education), (8) creativity (arts education), and (9) citizenship (human rights, democracy, agency, and peace education). This presentation proposes another element, which is the (10) curriculum itself.

In CIES 2022, indigenization of higher education curriculum is, in fact, not isolated from internationalization. It has been undertaken, on the one hand, to develop consciousness of the local, national, regional, and global, and, on the other hand, to accommodate students from different linguistic backgrounds and cultural experiences. For instance, redesigning a graduate education course at the University of Oxford was necessary because of certain forces: (1) socio-cultural and historical contexts with the said program being notoriously “elitist and exclusionary”; (2) unequal power hierarchies such as those among the faculty, students, administrators, and other university constituents; and (3) their various motivations (Serra, 2022). In line with place-based learning, Swentzell (2022) suggests the inclusion of Indigenous communities in school curriculum. Further, Dailey & Adelman (2022) note that ethnicity is one of the factors that determine student success in their engineering program. As such, engineering is not just a skillset but also a mindset, hence, identity (Busa, Northington, & Hatch, 2022; Iwamoto & Moussa, 2022). More practically, faculty development at the College of Engineering of the University of Anbar in Iraq prioritizes culturally relevant pedagogy for multicultural and multilingual contexts (DeBoer, Olayemi, Mohammed, & Ahmed, 2022). Unfortunately, this is not yet commonplace in the Philippine context. Curriculum development has mainly been unidirectional or top-down.

This presentation is an output of an online classroom-based action research. The participants were students in two sections of a scientific/technical writing course at the University of the Philippines Los Baños in First Semester of 2021-2022 (September 2021-January 2022). At that time, alert levels were high and prolonged. Before the semester ended, students were given a reading on tuping, which was an excerpt of a dissertation and developed into a journal article, and for which they wrote a reaction paper using a grid or a matrix as prescribed. However, only outputs of the engineering students (agricultural and biosystems, chemical, civil, electrical, industrial), being the majority, were included. Discourse analysis was employed to make sense of the qualitative data set and to elicit more specific categories or themes.

With Quality Assurance (QA) mechanisms in place, this study hardly penetrates or persuades the engineering departments or colleges of universities because of more pressing concerns such as ranking and passing rate in licensure examinations. However, this preliminary work has a lot to offer, particularly for IK as building blocks of the STEM track of Senior High School in the Philippines especially in areas where such structure and practice are still in place. The same can be explored for STEM or STEAM in other countries with rice culture.

Author

• Eric Joyce Dela Cruz Grande, University of the Philippines Los Banos