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Positively Filipino | Online Magazine for Filipinos in the Diaspora

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The Filipino's sense is more on the sociocentric end of the spectrum rather than the egocentric. Filipinos place a higher value on interpersonal cooperation ("bayanihan"), reciprocity ("kasamahan"), and social acceptance ("pakikisama") rather than on the individualistic culture's constructs of autonomy and uniqueness. Filipinos have strong family ties, and it's not only with immediate family members but extended family members as well. Obedience and respect of parents and elders are highly valued and we owe our elders a deep sense of gratitude ( utang na loob) for having paved the way for our stories and journeys.

The ways we share our stories are shaped by our concept of the self, our social relationships, and our values. In our kuwentuhan, there is a shared togetherness. We share our stories with our "kapwa." In a simple translation, "kapwa" means "other person" but according to Virgilio Enriquez, regarded by many as the Father of Philippine Psychology, "kapwa" really is better understood as "shared togetherness." When we do our kuwentuhan with our kapwa, our stories are shaped and transmitted by our shared identity, our shared togetherness.

A lot of the titos (uncles) and titas (aunties) I know like to ask the "Where are you from?" question when meeting someone for the first time. At first, it may sound pre-judgmental, especially in the American social context, but if we take the time to further reflect on that question, what we'll find is that it really is an innocent and genuine way for Filipinos to establish the connection. It really is shorthand for asking, "Where did your journey begin, where has it taken you, where are your ancestors from, and how is your story similar to mine?" As kapwa tao, our journeys are connected and in many ways the same. As Professor EJ David said, "In kapwa, we are all the same - no walls, no levels, no separations, no better, no worse." The question "Where are you from" is an invitation to share your story and realize our connectedness, our kapwa tao.

A culture of kuwentuhan

The Filipino culture is a storytelling culture. Kuwentuhan is our way of preserving our stories, histories, heritage, and the values we hold. Stories connect us to our ancestors - the journeys they have taken and how they have paved the way for us. Storytelling is how knowledge, wisdom, and values are passed down from one generation to the next.

Stories connect us to one another, with our kapwa. It is a way of building solidarity and cultivating our sense of shared identity. When we tell our stories and when we listen to one another's stories, we discover and strengthen our connections. We put ourselves into the storyteller's shoes. We insert ourselves into their narrative and we discover that we have more commonalities than differences. We find ourselves sharing in their stories of struggle and triumph. When we share stories, the activities of our "mirror neurons," the building blocks in our brains for language and empathy, are highly active, producing genuine emotions as well as genuine social connections.

When Western-trained social scientists and anthropologists first attempted to study the indigenous Filipino culture, they had to learn to use kuwentuhan as a methodology for collecting data because Filipinos did not just provide "data" to non-"kapwa tao." They shared "data" only by kuwentuhan. If you really want to get to know the Filipino culture, you dine with them and you listen to their stories. You first become a kapwa to them. In current Philippine psychology and psychotherapy, kuwentuhan is an invaluable method used to build rapport and understand the context of the person.

Today, in our rapidly changing society, the art of kuwentuhan is getting transformed, for better or for worse. With many of the stories moving to a digital platform, the essence of kuwentuhan is getting lost. It is true, the opportunities to connect with more people, especially in the digital world, are abundant. But as the quantity of our connections increase, the quality of our connectedness with our kapwa tends to suffer.

It may be true that we are able to tell more stories, whether through social media or whatever digital technology, but are we really able to share them in ways that enable us to realize our connectedness? One of the roots of our problems in society today, especially with the many issues that divide us, is that we no longer share stories like we used. We think we do when we share snippets of stories or tweets, but are they really enabling us to share and hear where the other is coming from. The character limitations on our smartphones as well as our busy schedules restrict us from fully realizing how connected we truly are. They just do not give our neurons the opportunity to align, synchronize, and march to the same beat.

Kuwentuhan is also listening

We must tell our stories and we encourage everyone to tell their stories. But we must not forget how important it is to keep the emphasis on listening. As author Susan Cain put it, "in a world that cannot stop talking," less and less people are on the listening side. The word "storytelling" implies an action word that goes one way - the telling of a story. Kuwentuhan is a lot more than just telling a story. The word "kuwentuhan" implies and requires both acts of telling and listening where a story is shared between and/or among kapwas.

The Urgent Need for Kuwentuhan Today

Today, it is more important than ever that we continue our kuwentuhan. We need to discover and rediscover our connections and commonalities, with our kapwa, with one another, and with our ancestors, those who have paved the way for us. We need to realize how linked our journeys are, how similar our struggles are, and how much of a shared identity we have as a people. We need to cultivate our connectedness. We need to continue to preserve our histories, where we came from, how we came to be, how we got here, and realize that we are kapwa tao, with a shared humanity and a shared togetherness. Kuwentuhan tayo.

The mission of the Kuwentuhan Tayo Project is to facilitate the sharing of our kuwentos (stories) in order to preserve our narratives and histories, to share our journeys, to know where we have been and where we are going, and to cultivate our sense of connectedness with our kapwa. To learn more, visit www.KuwentuhanProject.org .

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The Filipino's sense is more on the sociocentric end of the spectrum rather than the egocentric. Filipinos place a higher value on interpersonal cooperation ("bayanihan"), reciprocity ("kasamahan"), and social acceptance ("pakikisama") rather than on the individualistic culture's constructs of autonomy and uniqueness.

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This piece pushes back on the ways folks use "decolonization" beyond it's original meaning, critical of the ways the term has become an metaphor (decolonize your mind) but cognizant of the ways imperial projects permeate our world. Important to consider was we explore "decolonization" for BAYAN . . .

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What do we mean when we say "decolonize"?

A Native American friend of mine recently shared an academic article on social media that piqued my interest. Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012) is one of the few thoughtful discussions I've seen anywhere on the increasing popularity of the term "decolonization" in the American diversity discourse, and curiously, it predates the seemingly exponential deployment of the term during 2015 and 2016. This acceleration in use seems set to continue as people work out their responses to political upsets in colonial first world nations.

In their article, Tuck and Yang highlight the very real threat posed by co-optation of "social justice" language by a more establishment-oriented liberalism, and I think many of their fundamental concerns could be adapted and applied to the term "intersectionality" as well. For example, I've started to see people use the term "intersectionality" in journal articles about diversity in science, purporting to theorize in an intersectional manner, when all they mean is "we talked about women of color." Theorizing about what an intersectional perspective does to our discourse and remembering that Black women exist are simply not the same thing. The former requires effort, and the latter should be your baseline.

Essentially, by not carefully considering the word's meaning and its history, liberal adopters can end up stripping them of their value. I harp on liberalism here because I think too often liberals who believe we should seek to grow the status quo ("America is good, it just needs to be better!") co-opt the language of those trying to destroy the status quo ("America is an imperial project built on genocide!"). This can in some ways be more insidious than outright critics of decolonization - those some of us might label as conservative, or even more extremely, fascist.

For getting us to think carefully about this, I am thankful to Tuck and Yang. However, even as I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what they say, I also found myself shaking my head in disagreement with a fundamental discursive choice that they made. From the abstract:

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to "decolonize our schools," or use "decolonizing methods," or, "decolonize student thinking", turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, nonwhite, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism.

As is likely clear above, I share their concerns that many are engaging in liberals abuse "decolonize" when they dress up "diversity" as a deep post-colonial project when in fact it is just a coloring in of colonialism. Yet, I was troubled by Tuck and Yang's decision here to define North American colonialism as having such a limited scope, thus limiting how and when the term "decolonization" can be used and eliminating the possibility also of "decolonisation" as part of the American discourse. It is in some sense an isolationist standpoint that I think I cannot agree with.

What do I mean? I mean that while settler colonialism is the original and continuing sin of the American and Canadian projects, it isn't the only colonialism that factors into the modern makeup of the populations of North America. There are other geopolitical considerations, as well as intellectual considerations.

To the geopolitical, both Canada and the United States have longstanding histories of engaging in colonial projects outside of their (colonially self-defined) borders, and both Canada and the United States are inextricably entangled with colonial histories that predate their existence as self-ruling nations (imperial economics in Asia, South America/the Caribbean come to mind). And while I appreciate that Tuck and Yang recognize the legacy of slavery in formulating the phenomenon they describe as a "settler-native-slave" process, I don't think they properly reckon with the use of Black Africans (and on a smaller but very significant scale, Aboriginal Americans) as a form of wealth production. Wealth in the Americas is not only rooted in the land but is fundamentally dependent on the exploitation of human beings in order to convert the land into wealth. There is no economic might in North America without the three-way exploitation of the land, the people of it, and the people kidnapped from Africa to work it (as well as their descendants).

As a Black person of West Indian descent who knows that Black slaves were moved freely between the Caribbean and the United States especially after the trade with Africa was formally ended, I know I am American by birth but will forever be unsure if I am also American by heritage. My ancestors were certainly slaves in Barbados. It is impossible to know if they were also at one point slaves in the American south. But history teaches us that it is possible. Further, colonial forces shaped by complex dynamics between Europe and the United States are what eventually brought the family history that I do know out of the Caribbean and to North America. I could dig into similar examples that frame the presence of many Asian Americans in North America, which is complexly affected both by colonial aspirations and also by long-distance colonial forces.

As for intellectual considerations, which as many of you know has been a significant focus of mine, I possibly simply don't agree with Tuck and Yang that settler colonialism can ever simply be reduced to land theft. Epistemic marginalization is part of how land theft is enforced and maintained. For example, the residential schools in the United States and Canada which kidnapped Aboriginal (First Nations, Métis, and Inuit) children and forcibly stripped them of the culture, language, and even hair while making many victims of violence (including sexual abuse/rape) were furthering a colonial project of violently attacking what was not European about Native Americans, which was pretty much everything. The denial of language and history is to me part of the colonial project - in part designed to minimize the possibility that people will feel empowered to push back against and end colonialism.

I want to be clear that me writing this (short) essay is not intended to be a definitive statement on all the ways I will ever think about this, nor is it intended to qualify the value of Tuck and Yang's article. They make really important points and engage a conversation that we really need to have. If we are to talk about decolonization, we cannot be piecemeal about it, and they hit that point home well.

So let me be clear in my agreement with them: when we talk about decolonising/decolonizing science (as is often my habit), we need to be talking about it with the context of upending settler colonialism as part of that project. I cannot separate telling the truth about the history of Native Hawaiian astronomy from also not wanting Native Hawaiian astronomy to be used as an excuse to further colonize Hawaiian lands. I cannot separate wanting to tell the truth about Islamic contributions to physics from also having complex conversations about Native sovereignty and what that means for me as a descendent of one of the kidnapped ones. And while I've been having that conversation with members of my community (and sometimes talking about it on Twitter), I am aware that I should have been more explicit about my commitment to confronting settler colonialism and would like to correct that now.

Confronting/ending and engaging in restorative justice around settler colonialism has to be part of our decolonising science conversation, and in fact was for me from the very start, since I came to open discussion of decolonizing science because of the most recent controversy about the the uses and abuses of Mauna a Wakea. And notably, at least some of you may have noticed that I have been careful not to include the standard "diversity" fare on my Decolonising Science Reading List because much of that work isn't about decolonization at all but rather about somewhat expanding the status quo. They aren't the same, and Tuck and Yang are right to call our attention to that dangerous conflation.

I hope thus that I have made clear that even where I might disagree with Tuck and Yang from my standpoint as a different type of colonial subject than they are, I am in complete solidarity with their fundamental point that we need to oppose harmful and problematic deployments of "decolonization" without consideration for settler colonialism - whether it's here in North America, in the Marshall Islands, around the African continent, or in for example, Korea, as the case may be.

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Making Meaning of "Decolonising" - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein - Medium

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A Native American friend of mine recently shared an academic article on social media that piqued my interest. Decolonization is not a metaphor (2012) is one of the few thoughtful discussions I've seen anywhere on the increasing popularity of the term "decolonization" in the American diversity discourse, and curiously, it predates the seemingly exponential deployment of the term during 2015 and 2016.

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PBS documentary that captures the fight for Mexican American Studies program in Tucson Unified School District. Five Minutes

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Independent Lens | Precious Knowledge | Clip 2 | PBS

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Importance of naming.

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Black Panther leader's quote on decolonization and education.

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Akala : Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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Akala : Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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Afro-Brit rapper, author discusses his memoir and ideas about race, identity, education - definitely connected to empire/decolonization.

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Akala : Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

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From Edutopia - introductory piece on importance of including critical consciousness in our pedagogy.

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Recently, national media published several articles that examine educational inequality in our country. The New York Times analyzed the correlation between money, race, and success in different school districts, while National Public Radio produced a series titled School Money: The Cost of Opportunity.

This information about schools and the disparate daily realities of students are a reminder that educators must develop pedagogy that speaks to and examines a range of understandings and experiences. To ignore the lives of young people and the current state of affairs is to fail students and miss the potential for education to inform, challenge, and inspire change. There is work to be done in classrooms at all settings -- exclusive institutions, high-poverty areas, mixed-population schools, and environments not easily summarized -- but the work differs depending on the community and the individuals.

Windows and Mirrors

Gregory Michie and many other educators speak about the importance of windows and mirrors for students. This framework and reflection on unequal education leads to questions:

What is the role of windows and mirrors for a student in an affluent community and school?

How does this contrast with windows and mirrors for students in marginalized communities and schools?

Chris Emdin developed the idea of reality pedagogy for urban classrooms, where "teaching and learning [are] based on the reality of the student's experience." This pedagogical vision, an extension of the work of Paolo Freire and Gloria Ladson-Billings, can be used to develop guidelines and help root educators who use reality pedagogy, regardless of the students they serve.

Once there is a vision and a goal, educators can continually modify the guidelines. Here is a start:

Validate and Acknowledge

Students will not invest themselves in complex intellectual work unless they feel that their voice matters in the classroom. Depending on where we teach, some of our students may arrive at school not having had their basic needs met. At the other end of the spectrum, our students may come from environments steeped in vapid materialism and overconsumption. Maybe they're set in certain belief systems and unwilling to listen to the ideas of others. We can acknowledge that all students face challenges and struggles without ignoring larger struggles for social justice. Any community that asks people to learn, to be vulnerable, and to transform (Freire's idea of conscientization) must be a place where people know that they can be honest and that they will be heard.

Expose and Reveal the Unseen

Windows expose us to the others' realities. For students who grow up in what many call the mainstream of this country and are conditioned to think of themselves and their lives as normal, windows provide necessary access to different realities and understandings of the world. These windows allow students to begin questioning their own realities and assumptions while developing compassion for and understandings about the experiences of others.

No one should grow up without mirrors, feeling that their experiences or voice are without value. For some young people in our society, the public representation of their reality is regularly negative or lacking in complexity and substance. Learning that can access the familiar while providing opportunities to develop a public voice and examine one's own story and history is crucial to developing feelings of belonging and agency.

Question

When curriculum is framed around inquiry, the status quo is open to examination and debate. Susan Lytle, an education professor and author who influenced me greatly, speaks regularly of problematizing ideas. When units of study and classroom practice are based on inquiry, teachers can help students develop the intellectual feistiness to question what many of us have learned to accept as given:

Why is it that richer families live in certain areas and poorer families in others?

How can we explain the continued lack of diversity in different sectors of our society?

Why do schools in different neighborhoods look so different?

These types of questions encourage investigation and help people develop clearer windows and mirrors.

Reflect

Learning is so much deeper when students have opportunities for metacognition. Opportunities for reflection also allow students to begin sorting through different emotions related to learning. Did information about injustice lead to anger? (That's a natural response.) Did some feel guilt for their participation in unjust systems that they didn't choose or create? (That's natural as well.) Opportunities to articulate and process one's learning allow people to move toward informed action.

Growing Into Consciousness

Our country has a remarkable education system that allows millions of youth to be nurtured, challenged, and encouraged every school day. In this context, with a vision of the potential of democratic education, we should acknowledge the ways in which we fall short and the need for students from different backgrounds to be challenged and/or validated.

In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his son, "I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness." We should wish -- and create -- the same for our students.

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Teaching Toward Consciousness | Edutopia

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Recently, national media published several articles that examine educational inequality in our country. The New York Times analyzed the correlation between money, race, and success in different school districts, while National Public Radio produced a series titled School Money: The Cost of Opportunity.

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Latinx scholar/teacher behind the Mexican American Studies program from the documentary Precious Knowledge. Fifteen Minutes

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"Putting African Philosophies at the Center of Learning" 

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"Putting African Philosophies at the Center of Learning" 

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Think piece that might help BAYAN folks think about what it means to intergrate/ground FIlipno/a philosophies into our program. Short. Easy read.

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What happens when African philosophies and practices are placed at the centre of learning? How can teachers and students on the continent use the concepts of ubuntu (human interdependence) and ukama (relationality) to come up with homegrown solutions for societal and educational concerns?

These were two of the questions we sought to answer when we set up a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), Teaching for Change. It was run jointly by Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Future-Learn, an initiative run by the Open University in the UK.

A MOOC is a course made available for free over the internet and can cater for thousands of people at once. More than 4000 people from around the world - most from the US, UK and a variety of African countries - took part in ours.

Indigenous forms of education, created and honed in African countries by African people, have historically been criticised as somehow inferior to forms from the Western world. But a shift is underway, as we found. Education systems around the world are increasingly recognising the value of local approaches to thinking, learning and being.

Here's what we - and the participants - learned. These lessons could be valuable to anyone who wants to centre African philosophies in a MOOC or similar course.

Applying African philosophies

The renowned scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah has shown that humans' capacities to think, reason, disagree, speak, listen and be listened to are important in constructing and reconstructing understanding.

Constructing and reconstructing an African notion of education, then, depends on borrowing from, exchanging with other cultures, and initiating thought and action that are novel. At its heart it is about respecting others' rights universally, and about people being reflective and open about their own stories.

Here's an example of how the philosophies of ubuntu and ukama were applied in the Teaching for Change MOOC. Not all 4000 students were registered at once; 2000 were registered at a time over two six-week periods that extended over two years. Throughout this between 250 and 300 students engaged online while others could be considered active "listeners".

Students were encouraged to share their views or claims about knowledge, education, schooling, teaching and learning in their own contexts. Invariably, these views were in agreement or clashed with their classmates'. Practising ubuntu demanded that they then articulate their willingness to engage with one another in an atmosphere of openness without insulting or discrediting another's point of view.

This encouraged people to remain dignified and respectful towards one another in any educational encounter. They were asked to listen attentively to different and even contending points of view. Afterwards, they were encouraged to offer points of view that clarified existing views.

Then, applying the theory of ukama, students were asked to see themselves in an ongoing and relational conversation with one another without prematurely judging another's point of view as irrelevant. They considered others' views without rushing to judgement.

Students found these approaches useful. They were taught to not only share their views and stories (and stories, of course, play a large role on a continent with a rich oral history), but to offer reasons for these views.

Learning to justify stories is an important part of African philosophy. Kwase Wiredu, N'Dri Assie-Lumumba and Kwame Gyekye are three notable theorists who consider storytelling in relation to justification through reasons being as significant to what it means to engage in education. A famous text on African philosophy edited by Wiredu provides textual evidence for the importance of storytelling in cultivating ubuntu and ukama.

Narrating stories or views in this setting followed a communal approach: one told a story, and another listened to it. Then the "story" was retold through engaging with others' ideas and contributions. So students didn't just internalise understandings of African education as if nothing should be questioned. Instead they made sense of one another's stories and in this way developed more informed understandings of the stories being told.

Participants engaged collectively, drew on their own existing thoughts about African education and learned from others. This approach to learning is not in one direction as if teachers have the sole authority to give an account of reasons. Students also have a voice as they assume responsibility for their claims. Students' voices are at the fulcrum of democratic education which is necessary for assisting them in critically reflecting on their own social, cultural and economic contexts.

Thoughtful inquiry

Our task as university teachers on this MOOC was to find the opportunity to connect students to real problems plaguing the African continent. Examples of such problems are military dictatorships, famine and hunger, food insecurity, and societal violence. They were given space to collectively find ways to address and perhaps even resolve these problems.

The students rose to the task, recognising the need for thoughtful inquiry if Africa's many injustices are to be eradicated. They used the MOOC's online discussion forums to express their ideas - and most clearly embraced the idea of an African approach to education.

This scholarly effort to bring about societal and transformative change through collaborative teaching and learning is bearing fruit. We have already been approached to run the MOOC again and are working on an amended version. And, thanks to the MOOC, we've now published a book called Rupturing African Philosophy on Teaching and Learning: Ubuntu Justice and Education with Palgrave-MacMillan in New York. It will appear in July 2018.

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What happens when you put African philosophies at the centre of learning

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What happens when African philosophies and practices are placed at the centre of learning? How can teachers and students on the continent use the concepts of ubuntu (human interdependence) and ukama (relationality) to come up with homegrown solutions for societal and educational concerns?