HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES: LIBERATING WORDS, ARTS, AND OTHER TENETS AMID PANDEMIC

Shirley Diamzon Quiambao

This pandemic has caused changes in the system of educating young minds. Laboratories, equipment, and other essential devices are out for now as faceto-face delivery of lessons and activities is off, but it is a toast not only for other strands of the senior high school program to deliver instruction during this trying time. The Humanities and Social Sciences strand is also under pressure in this new normal.

Teaching language and its tenets is a gargantuan task in the new normal. Sharing linguistic knowledge in the new system as we shifted from the old paradigm to new platforms of teaching is a challenging endeavor as words, phrases, sentences, both in creative and technical aspects of language are hardly taught and learned when there is not real-life application or production of such knowledge; hence, linguistic performance is pivotal. It is a mere toast for the strand to cater the individualistic needs of learners, monitoring and assessing their progress, and inculcating language structures and methodologies when affective filters are on.

Teaching arts and its components is also a colossal challenge for the strand for this time, when everything, including resources and other materials, is limited. Arts may be liberating and can provide rest for some, but it is a taxing task to do when you are at home, coping with anxiety, and learning how to do arts all at the same time.

As a result, arts may not be one stage to release the mental war students and teachers have during this time.

Facts are important aspects of the strand as teachers and students battle to cry for concrete freedom, liberating principles, and historical developments to understand the present and future of our nation and of the world.

This time, it is an endeavor that creeps the entire strand as we gallop for truth yet we have limited resources to cover the truth we are running after for libraries are closed and the internet pervasively provides fake news and information.

Teaching how to govern and lead people entails a myriad number of notions. Face-to-face teaching and learning may be a possible route to teaching these things fully; however, the new normal does not permit this.

It is a challenging task for teachers and learners to teach and learn the tenets of these aspects of Humanities and Social Sciences as we all look at the face of governing people in a very different piece--- the new normal nation and the new normal world. Questions such as who shall govern?

What should be governed in this trying time? are topmost essentials that we need to cater and the discovery of new methods to answer these queries is yet to be done.

With all these challenging tasks, gigantic endeavors, and almost impossible paradigm shift in the system especially in teaching and learning humanities and social sciences come a very important key: adapting to change with grace.

It may be a new normal set up for us in liberating our words, arts, and other tenets related to humanities and social sciences, but at a glance to our hearts and minds to transform and to change the world to be a better place to be lived by the next generation of builders of truth, patriotism, language, and arts, we can make it.

It is challenging, but surely it is not impossible.

--oOo-The author is T-II HUMMS at Benigno S.Aquino National High School