Mindanao's Tribes In Today's Curriculum

I bet everyone is familiar with Social Studies or "Hekasi". It's a subject which is actually a mishmash of several social sciences: history, geography, economics, and culture.

During my high school years, one glaring omission from the curriculum was an introduction to the varied cultures of the ethnic tribes in Mindanao. I would only discover the B'laan, Tausugs, Mandayas, Samas etc. when I was already in college, under the tutelage of Dr. Macario Tiu.

This is quite unfortunate because the tribes of Mindanao are a big part of our heritage as the many Spanish or American colonizers which occupied the island. The tribes' histories are our history and their cultures pretty much permeate whatever culture we've inherited. 

During a conversation last night, Mama had shared that the sentiment to include ethnic studies in high school social studies is already here. The only question now is what approach should the faculty adopt to incorporate this into the curriculum.

I understand that for something as essential as ethnic studies, we do not have the necessary or complete literature on Mindanao's tribes. Studies typically focus on just one tribe and these are "few and far" between. 

The first step then for ethnic studies to become viable is to make a textbook or a compendium of all these separate studies. The work of the editors of this book is sure to be daunting but this is the only way we can introduce Mindanao's tribes systematically. 

Once the literature has been collated and compiled in one single reference source, we can now proceed in building a modular lesson plan that will be suited to each school's respective pedagogy. 

One advantage of this approach is that we can better appreciate the gaps in our research efforts when we can see what we really have or see what we actually know about the subject matter. 

But it begs the question: what do the students gain from studying these tribes especially since today's urban society is more dominated by Western cultures and the cultures of the Bisayas and Tagalogs? Well, apart from bringing us back to our roots, it is a way to teach the next generation how to live in a multicultural world. It is also a way to remind our students of the wealth of our collective past and to shape their identities to the fullest.