MLE in Laoag, Zamboanga

NAKEM Conferences, MMSU hold MLE Forum, launch “SUKIMAT”

 

Nakem Conferences Philippines and Nakem Conferences International, in partnership with the Mariano Marcos State University jointly held the first-ever Mother Language Education Forum in Ilocos Norte. The forum was held July 16 at MMSU Laoag.  

 

In that same gathering, the Nakem also launched Sukimat: Researches on Ilokano and Amianan Studies, a joint publication of the Nakem International and Nakem Philippines.

 

Dr. Miriam Pascua, President of MMSU, gave the opening remarks. Provincial board member Hon. Maria Elena Nalupta, representing Governor Michael Keon, gave an inspirational commitment to support the MLE initiative in the province.

 

The forum discussed the urgency of MLE as a new approach to responding to the challenges of Philippine education.

 

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawai’i, the Nakem Conferences International and the alliance, 170+Talaytayan MLE, delivered a presentation entitled “Mother Language Education, Cultural Democracy, and Social Justice” while Ricky Ma. Duran Nolasco of the University of the Philippines and president of 170+Talaytayan MLE delivered a lecture entitled, “Mother-Tongue Based Education and Sustainable Development.”

 

Earlier, on July 6, Agcaoili and Nolasco, together with Hon. Magtanggol Gunigundo, Atty. Manuel Lino Faelnar, Prof. Ched Arzadon, and Dr. Paraluman Giron were part of the Manila contingent for the first-ever Zamboanga City forum on MLE.

 

Gunigundo is the author of the House Bill 3179 that proposed for a Mother-Language Education until the sixth grade.

 

Faelnar is executive director of LUDABI, a group of Bisayan advocates pursuing the cause of diversity and pluralism and the promotion the Bisayan languages.

 

Arzadon teaches at the University of the Philippines’ College of Education while Giron is regional director of the Department of Education’s MIMAROPA.

 

Sukimat, the 4^th book of Nakem Conferences, and the first joint publication of Nakem International and Nakem Philippines, gathers the essays of 12 researchers who presented their works in during the 2007 and 2008 Nakem conferences held at MMSU and St. Mary’s University, respectively. These essays came from a pool of more than a hundred researches.

 

Meanwhile, those who served as reactors to the presentation were Dr. Norma Fernando, superintendent of Batac City Schools; Dr. Cecil Aribuabo, superintendent of Ilocos Norte Schools; Prof. Araceli Pastor, superintendent of Laoag City Schools; and Peter La. Julian, Philippine Daily Inquirer Northern Luzon bureau.

Other lectures and fora on MLE and related issues where Agcaoili will deliver a lecture or presentation have been slated for Dagupan City; for Tuguegarao City’s St Louis University; for Bayombong’s St. Mary’s University; and for Manila’s Polytechnique University of the Philippines.

 

 

Support for Cultural Pluralism in the Philippines

STATEMENT

ON THE NEED FOR MOTHER LANGUAGE EDUCATION

IN THE PHILIPPINES AND THE NEED FOR ILOKANO

IN THE AMIANAN

                                  November 15, 2008

We belong to a language and culture advocacy group, the Nakem Conferences. The organization is composed of various colleges, universities, cultural organizations, writers, cultural workers, academics, educational administrators, and scholars on Ilokano- Amianan Studies and from the Amianan, or Northern Philippines.

Likewise, Nakem Conferences has been responsible for the holding of three international conferences on language and culture education, with researchers and scholars on the various cultures and languages of the Amianan and abroad in attendance.

We are issuing this statement to make it known that we are concerned about the continuing injustice in the respect, promotion, preservation, and teaching of our first and mother languages, our lingua francae, and other indigenous languages. We are concerned because of the cultural denigration that has been the lot of our students in the continuing ‘Tagalogization’ of basic education classrooms of the country. 

Nakem Conferences holds on to the belief in the basic principle of justice and democracy in education. In a multicultural society such as the Philippines, the principle of justice and democracy translates to the access by educands of the knowledge that is pertinent to them through their own mother language.

This principle of educational access through mother language starts off from the idea that formal education in whatever form is always a dynamic movement from the known, which is knowledge mediated by mother language, to the unknown, which is the knowledge mediated by other languages that the educands have yet to learn.

We have looked closely and critically at this issue of knowledge acquisition and education in the Philippines and we have come to the conclusion, based on our experiences as teachers, educators, cultural workers, and researchers, that the present set-up that permits our educands access to knowledge that they have to acquire through Tagalog and English alone and never through their mother tongue and the lingua franca  have closed the door to productive knowledge about themselves, their communities, their relationship to other peoples, and the competencies they need to know as they equip themselves with the skills required in their life of civics and citizenship. 

 

We at Nakem Conferences have given our full support for a congressional legislative initiative to address this need, with the Multicultural Education and Literacy Act of 2008 (or House Bill 3179) proposed by Hon. Magtanggol Gunigundo. Our support for that initiative establishes our commitment to multicultural education and to once-and-for-all zero in on the fundamental issues of Philippines education, issues that have not been given importance in the past but which issues are the main reasons why we are lagging behind in the basic skills that our educands must be equipped with.

We continue to support initiatives to advance the cause of multicultural education and to pursue the ends of cultural pluralism as a way of life in our country.

Multicultural education, and thus, multilingual education as well—in and outside our classrooms, in and outside the educational system—are practices that are not only liberatory but also what social justice and cultural democracy demands of us as a pluricultural and plurilingual society.

It is in this light that we are issuing this statement in order to give full support to all initiatives that advance these ends and to declare that the skewed and continuing two language-education in the Philippines—the education of our people in Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino and English—is not sufficient to make good with our commitment to a socially just and fair, and therefore, emancipatory education.

Our partnerships and linkage at Nakem Conferences have proven that to insist on the right of our peoples in the Amianan to be educated in their own languages, to be educated in the mother tongue, and to be educated in the lingua franca is the way to go to fight for our indispensable human rights to our own languages and cultures.

In our case at Nakem Conferences and in the Amianan, we are clear about the importance of Ilokano as the mother tongue of many and as the lingua franca in most of the three regions (Region 1, CAR, and Region 2). We are mindful as well of the existence—and the need to assure that they do not only survive but also thrive—of various languages in the Amianan and their indispensable role in the pursuit of a liberatory education that we have been dreaming for so long for our people long deprived of the abode of their souls, their own mother tongue.

DR. ALEGRIA TAN VISAYA

President, Nakem Conferences International Philippines

c/o Mariano Marcos State University

Batac, Ilocos Norte, Philippines

  

DR. AURELIO SOLVER AGCAOILI

President, Nakem Conferences (International)

c/o University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Honolulu, Hawai’i, U.S.A.

 

 

(Statement sent via email from the address of Nakem Conferences, nakemconference@yahoo.com. For questions about this statement, you can write us using this email address.) 

Language Struggle, 2

Dialogues in Philippine Diversity, 2

(Note: This is an exchange I had with Prof. Raymund Pascual Addun, an authority on translation studies in Spanish and a scholar on Amianan cultures and languages. This exchange was from an e-mail group of language advocates that pursues cultural pluralism as a template for a revisiting of the conception and praxis of public life in the Philippines. Hon, HI, Nov 16/08)

Aloha Raymund, kia ora:

You are right: this is not going to be a walk in the park. 

This patriarchy (you have to understand that Anonuevo and his ilk is a product, plain and simple, of Tagalog patriarchy) has combined with the restive politics of our languages, and the same patriarchy is no longer secure in its perch precisely because its crown and its victory is based on an unstable ground. 

Remember that metaphor about revolutions and the useless victories of a crown when that crown is perched on bayonets--well, Tagalog, Tagalogization, and Tagalogism have an army and a navy, literal and real, as our tax monies are being used to protect these inutile positions of monolingualism when the whole wide world is opening up to cultural pluralism--and the bayonets stand on a quicksand?   

Those in the know about Tagalog aesthetics, particularly Tagalog poetry--which is being passed off as P/Filipino poetry and which is the same kind of poetry that is being vended as THE poetry of the Filipino people at the Palancas--is sired--yes, 'sired' is the term here which is 'putot' in Ilokano, by Tagalog patriarchs, many of them based at the University of the Philippines and whose salaries, from our taxes and from our foreign debts and from our foreign remittances we are paying.

What is this? 

We pay the salaries of people to destroy us via the institutions of our culture, education, and language? 

Where on earth can we find a situation like this except in countries like the Filipinas where the peoples of the periphery have accepted to be docile, subservient, and vigilantes against their own sense of self and interest? 

Obviously, that Tagalogistic guy operates from a position of comfort and convenience. 

Someone ought to tell him to learn--no, force to learn Ibanag or Ilonggo in much the same way we are forced to learn, indeed, his Tagalog language via a subtle tactic we call for want of a better term, Philippine monolingual/bilingual education and let us see what he says.

Oh well, I have heard that some of those in his group--they have a powerful bloc of Tagalistas, some of them are useless Ilokanos, by the way--are afraid to speak up, for reasons that are economic, relational, and, hold your breath now, 'baka tilian sila ng kanilang Tatay--their Tatay might scream at them.' (I am quoting here; I am not inventing.) 

Your guess is as good as mine. 

At a lecture I delivered at the University of the Philippines Los Banos in July 2007--a lecture attended by faculty of that university, the better students, and many teachers and officials of the Department of Education of that part of the country--I challenged them with this: "Let us start to translate the meaning of social justice in our classrooms. 

"The only way to get us into a national conversation is for your Tagalog students or pro-Tagalogistic mindsets to get to learn other Philippine languages. 

"You are doing a disservice to the Tagalog students by pampering them with the idea--and making them believe--that the privilege and entitlement of the Tagalog language is natural, is the state of affairs, and is God-given. It is not."

I only had silence when I said those words in a hall packed with strange spirits and sympathetic souls who could see the points I was raising.

But one professor, Dr. Paul Zafaralla, stood up to say that I was right.

So here is the logic: Why ram into the throat Ilonggo students with Tagalog strange sounds and strange words when you do not do the same to the students of the Tagalog region? 

And in the national assessment, you use the same yardstick? 

Where are the better-educated and the more intelligent teachers of the republic? 

Think of national conversation--and you can only imagine how ignorant many of our teachers are, teachers who have been lobotomized into believing that the 'nation-state' is more important than our cultural communities, as if our cultural communities do not have any sense of nation and state at all, but not in the way the Tagalogistic mind would see it. 

These are the same teachers (and some poets, too, who are products of literary incestuous relationships!) who cannot distinguish Tagalogization from Tagalogism. A person steeped in analytical skills, as the philosophers, particularly the philosophers of human thought and language, should be able to follow the road to the 'distinguo' as a means and a method to clarifying what the issues at hand are. 

That Tagalista guy who fails to distinguish the terms Tagalogization and Tagalogism (and failing as well to imagine that the suffix 'ism' is not always in accord with all the 'isms' he is fantastically enamored with should teach himself to learn another Philippine language for him to understand that he has imprisoned his mind with the world afforded by his Tagalog word. 

Some people do not learn because they cannot. 

Or they refuse to because it is more convenient to do so; because it is more economically rewarding to do so; because it is more comfortable to do so.

Let this struggle be won.

Aurelio Agcaoili
Nakem Conferences

 On Sun, 11/16/08, Raymundo Pascual Addun (email removed)wrote:

From: Raymundo Pascual Addun
Subject: [The DILFED Forum] Re: It is not the name, it is the struggle
To: advocacy group removed

Date: Sunday, November 16, 2008, 2:15 PM

yes indeed prof. ariel. this fight is not over. the first cannon 

salvos scarcely have been heard.  this is a long drawn struggle. 

Lets go the grassroots now. Anonuevo and the Tagalistas have the center. we will have the country. rebbeng laeng to PPW protracted peoples war)to use JM Sison's terminology. Let was go to every local govt and every local organization. And then the Tagalistas, añonuevo included, will soon listen to the cry  of protest and linguistic revolution. 

 
No amount of tagalog  hocus focus can hide the fact the Tagalog is killing the other languages. This, anonuevo cannot see in his distorted logic. We have been saying that the other languages are killled bcause theyre not taught and used in school. Its as plain as that. But Anonuevos mind cannot seem to appreciate this simple fact.   

he even boast thats tagalog (Filipino) has developed on the diligence of its users. The fact is that the development of Filipino was  deliberate and programmatic/systematic through the
educational institutions to the detriment of the other languages.  

Raymund