With the shift of instructions, this chapter presents how pandemic has hugely affected the learning quality of Filipino learners. With those academic challenges, classroom practices were innovated to address the learners' needs through critical pedagogy (CP). Initially, the “stories of the people” were used as instructional tools because of their impact on the learners as victims of learning oppression. These “stories” centered on the country's resiliency in addressing the pandemic issues such as education and health readiness, food security, and equality to basic services. Critical approaches, such as the community-based, inquiry-based, problem-based, and reflective approaches, were employed to convert people's stories into new knowledge. Besides CP, the UN's Sustainable Development Goals serves as a new reference to strengthen criticality. These goals are more explicit for the learners to shape a humanized world. Hence, integrating criticality and sustainability can better serve Philippine basic education in achieving social justice to break oppression, and marginalization.
TopCriticality In A Conservative Philippine Education
The genesis of critical pedagogy, initially termed conscientization, was born in Latin America's struggle against political and military oppression and social inequities that worsen the condition of the poor, the peasants, and, generally, the marginalized groups. At the same time, this approach and social movement were popularized by Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire. According to Viola (2016), these conditions of the marginalized and oppressed Latinos are reflected on the opposite side of the world, the Philippines. With the severe condition of the education sector, including the teachers, the learners, and the system, he adopted E. San Juan's idea of “filipinizing critical pedagogy.” He further stressed:
I embark on a project to “filipinize” critical pedagogy that will link the historical materialist orientation of critical pedagogy with the transformative activities of Filipinos in a global diaspora. It is my belief that such an approach can provide an important standpoint to counter the shallow strategies of neoliberal multiculturalism in the United States and the unbridled racism most evident in the US “wars of terrorism” that haunt people of color throughout the world … the “filipinization” of critical pedagogy provides educators with an archive of practice and theory that educators “can dare use, test, enrich, and appropriate for a future waiting to be born” (San Juan, 2007b, p. 154). A future of universal human rights, global economic justice, and peace where genuine expressions of democracy and multiculturalism can flourish may seem a utopian dream. While the future is never guaranteed, with a “filipinized” critical pedagogy, we can gain strength in an awareness of a longstanding Filipino struggle that is stubborn in its refusal to accept that something so desired and necessary is not worth fighting to attain. (p. 12)
Asian learners are passive and reticent (Kumaravadivelu, 2003). These include Filipinos, of course! It is common knowledge in the Asian region that the power of the authority plays significantly in the lives of the people across sectors. Education cannot escape from that reality because of the power of the authority, the policy, and the regulations that every member ought to follow. Being a conservative and value-influenced society, we call this practice “respect, humility, politeness, obedience, and kindness” injected in the very veins of Filipinos from their childhood. Hence, the absence of these values means the eradication of Filipino identities. In the context of critical education, these practices make students suffer the consequences of simply “listening, receiving, following, and adopting” (Freire, 1993) those imposed standardized rules and regulations that sustain a fossilized unequal power between the teachers and the learners.
Education remains weak and passive behind the institutions' call for revolutionary reform in education. Hence, these common goals toward change, development, sustainability, and empowerment remain classic education slogans that serve as a documentary avenue to sustain institutions' branding without aggressively concretizing those goals. In Freire's banking system (Freire, 2000), teachers remain powerful classroom agents who produce and deposit the needed knowledge to the empty cups, the students who receive that deposited knowledge. With the manipulated roles of the teachers, the learning process is a one-way ticket that does not allow any form of engagement and feedback on the part of the students (rf. Table 1). In the end, the well-decorated academic term, critical thinking, is not fully understood and materialized.
Table 1.
Freire’s (2000) Banking System of Education
| Teachers | Students |
| Teach | Are taught |
| Know everything | Know nothing |
| Think | Are thought about |
| Talk | Listen |
| Discipline | Are disciplined |
| Choose and enforce their choice | Comply |
| Act | Follow the action of the teachers |
| Choose the suggested contents or topics strictly | (not consulted) adapt the chosen program content |
| Establish authority which appears to be detrimental to the freedom of learning | No authority |
| Subjects of the learning process | Objects of the learning process |