INDIGENOUS PEOPLES EDUCATION PROGRAM

RALPH D. BACCAY

The Department of Education served has been serving millions of IP learners in thousands of public schools around the Philippines.

Through DepEd Order 62, s. 2011 or the National Indigenous Peoples Education Policy Framework which was formulated after several consultation sessions with IP leaders and elders, the Department officially commenced the institutionalization of the Indigenous Peoples Education (IPEd) Program in 2011.

The policy adopts a rights-based approach and directs the implementation of an education that is anchored on the social and cultural context of IP learners.

The IPEd program is DepEd’s response to the right of indigenous communities and indigenous learners to an education that is responsive to their context. It respects their identities, and it values and promotes their knowledge systems, and their competencies, and the values that are important to them, and the other parts of their heritage.

According to the Peoples Education Office (IPsEO), this was a product of the dialogue of DepEd and IP communities trying to find common ground so that the advocacy, for what is now called Indigenous Peoples Education, could move forward.

Some of the continuing initiatives for IP learners to experience culture-responsive education are the contextualization of lesson plans, use of the local language for teaching, having elders as teachers and mentors, using the ancestral domain as classroom, establishing IPEd Senior High School, hiring more teachers who know the knowledge and the culture, and delivering more facilities.

To sustain IPEd in schools, the Department aims to have additional Program Support Funds (PSF) to ensure learning continuity though continued contextualization of learning resources, orientation of new teachers and school heads assigned to schools in IP communities, and enhancement learning delivery modalities.

Furthermore, DepEd plans to support long-term community development through education initiatives that can promote responsive indigenous community knowledges, like indigenous farming and health systems, through the rural farm schools, senior high school offerings, and similar initiatives. The IPEd Program also seeks to align with the call of UNESCO that all curricula are to have education for sustainable development as its core by 2025.

-oOoThe author is a Teacher I at Camias High School