Project Report - La Trobe University

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(National Aborigines and Islander Day Observance Committee) Week. The event, led by Australian Embassy Charge d’ Affaires Steve Scott included activities featuring Australia’s rich and diverse indigenous heritage. The Embassy has been helping preserve indigenous culture in the Philippines Indigenizing Education in a Kalinga Public School | 36 through its Basic Education Assistance for Mindanao (BEAM) program which benefited more than 34,000 students and 800 teachers. Since 2006, its Direct Aid Program (DAP) has also provided P3 million funds to programs that contribute to the welfare and income-generating capacity of the IPs.
Appendix 4. Connect Magazine article What more could we ask for? By Maria Cameron and Edwin Wise Indigenizing Education in a Kalinga Public School | 37 Published in the April-June 2009 edition of Connect Magazine, the quarterly publication of the Volunteering for International Development from Australia. Also available online at the AYAD-VIDA Portal Philippines (http://ayad-vida.devconceptsph.com/news-andfeatures/290-preserving-ip-culture-in-kalinga) Edwin Wise and Maria Cameron, the authors, are VIDA volunteers working at Dananao, Kalinga as Educational Materials Developer, Cultural Documenter and Networking Advisor. After two hours of hiking – first climbing up the steep road from Tinglayan, then horizontally along the walking track, we reach the footbridge across a tributary of the Chico River. The last stretch before we reach our destination in the hardest: almost-vertical much of the way. We stop to rest, breathless, at the terraced rice fields along the track. Clouds fill the valley below, the afternoon sun streams from the west. Thankfully, this last stretch we hike in full shade. At last, we arrive. First, we see a cluster of rice granaries and a stand of coffee trees. We enter the village from the east: a collection of 102 houses form a loose crescent moon around a series of terraced, irrigated rice fields, bathed in gold by late afternoon light. Only just planted out with pachug (rice seedlings), the fields are a vibrant green. We hear the dull thud of rice being pounded, by hand, with aru and rusung – implements best described as giant, wooden mortar and pestle. Groups of children can be heard – singing, laughing, crying, shouting. A few scrub the black from the bottom of big cooking pots in the irrigation channels, using the grit of sand and their feet as scrubbers. Pigs and chooks scratch in the village paths. Farmers with heavy loads make their way home from a hard day’s work in their fields. We sit on the porch of the house where we are hosted by our dear friends Agom and Gaspar. We sip sweet, hot coffee, and watch the village life unfold before us until dusk, in a theatre-like arrangement of houses. This is Chananaw (formally Dananao), original home of the Ichananaw tribe of Kalinga, located in the north of the Cordillera mountain range of Luzon (the largest island in the Philippines). It is also our ‘office’ for the next five months. The Cordilleras, along with the Muslim south, was the only area of the Philippines never under direct Spanish control, although this was not without 300 years of attempts. The Spaniards’ desire to reap souls as well as gold left a bloody mark on the Cordilleras’ history, as well as demarcating ‘lowlanders’ from ‘uplanders’, ‘civilised’ from ‘barbarians’, or ‘Christians’ from ‘pagans’. Today’s Cordilleras still reflect this history of autonomy, although the cross was brought, along with Western education, by the Americans – after they purchased the Philippines from Spain for $20 million, along with Cuba, in 1898. Today’s Chananaw reflects a shared yet singular history: public education only arrived in the 1950s and the church followed in the 1960s. Even now, no road
Page 1 and 2: Project Report Indigenizing Educati
Page 3 and 4: Chananaw is surrounded by terraced
Page 5 and 6: Once upon a time… Project backgro
Page 7 and 8: The project at a glance Timeframe P
Page 9 and 10: Arranging support Obtaining funding
Page 11 and 12: At the forefront of our mind was ou
Page 13 and 14: Maria drafted the written English t
Page 15 and 16: The tangible results Project output
Page 17 and 18: The intangible results Project outc
Page 19 and 20: issues. It is possible that the net
Page 21 and 22: Thank yous and goodbyes Project han
Page 23 and 24: Friends first Probably the single m
Page 25 and 26: What challenged us? The main challe
Page 27 and 28: Publishing for a wider audience? Al
Page 29 and 30: Appendices Project schedule and pro
Page 31 and 32: Appendix 2. Philippine Daily Inquir
Page 33 and 34: materials suited to the needs and c
Page 35: culture, language, traditional poli
Page 39 and 40: centers and pre-schools across the

Project Report - La Trobe University

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