Yes, they deliver Perla Aragon-Choudhury Philippine Daily Inquirer
November 08, 2009
LET’S call her Maria, this waitress in Ormoc City took advantage of a lull in the work to do her module in math.
Concentrated on her task, she was unaware that her diligence was making an impression on a customer, an engineer who offered to help her with her lessons.
From Luzon to Visayas and Mindanao, many learners like Maria have availed of the modular approach for the possibility of studying any time and anywhere, be it the workplace or the farm.
It was in 1995 that Fr. Rogelio Jose Bautista Alarcon, OP, founder-director of the Angelicum Non-graded Open School, opened the Home Study Program (HSP) for paying students.
After seeing how effective it was in delivering education, he proposed to the whole Angelicum community the idea of offering it to the entire country.
As a result, Angelicum launched the Home Study Program for the Poor in January 1999, in partnership with the government. It was later renamed REAP, short for Re-entry Education Agenda for the Poor.
Alarcon’s innovation has turned curricular grades and traditional teacher lesson plans into “student lesson plans and road maps for learning.”
Individualized instruction
The program calls books “modules” or, more formally, Individualized Learning Packages. Teachers are “facilitators” and students are “learners.” Grade levels are referred to as “years of schooling” (or more informally, YS). The entire campus behind Santo Domingo Church is its classroom.
Today, REAP has 978 learners and 39 learning sites, reports Grace Donadillo, team principal for the HSP.
“And now we have this,” she says, referring to a spacious room in Angelicum.
Facilitators have their tables on one side and can be available to learners who do their modules in a glass-walled area with chairs and book shelves that face the other wall. The setup helps, especially when they take their mastery tests.
“Here is where a 56-year-old yaya does her modules as she waits for her charge to come out of St. Theresa’s,” Donadillo says with obvious pride.
REAP has reached more than the out-of-school youth for whom it was initially envisioned by Alarcon.
As early as 2000 it has been helping, among others, jail inmates in Palawan, Antique, Iloilo and the cities of Bacolod and Davao, as well as the wards of nuns and sisters in, among others, Pangarap, Caloocan; Sucat, Parañaque; Villa Maria, Quezon City; and Batulao, Batangas.
“I’ve walked seven mountains and five rivers just to reach a site,” smiles Donadillo, recalling semester and summer breaks when the Angelicum staff—not only facilitators like her—had met with community leaders and eager learners to start off REAP.
Donadillo says they partner with and mobilize different types of institutions and individuals.
“In Dolores, Quezon, our volunteer coordinator, Mely Velasquez, met Fr. Alarcon in a parish of the Dominicans,” she recalls. “Her work drew the interest of a Japanese national who had bought land to live there and who now supports it. They have a graduate of BS Elementary Education who has volunteered to tutor her former classmates.”
Learning as they work
And when he was in Palawan, Manila Auxiliary Bishop Broderick Pabillo built a house for learners who would have walked two to three hours just to get to school. Today the boarders learn discipline as they work on their modules, carry out assigned chores, grow organic vegetables for their food, eat and pray together.
“Parents can stay overnight in a nipa hut which they helped build,” Donadillo says.
REAP is meant to be used for and with learners who are in situations that prevent them from attending school every day for reasons that, according to Fr. Alarcon, are often linked to poverty.
With volunteers from Angelicum and from the community itself, learners can get that degree they have always aspired for.
To qualify for REAP, a site must have a volunteer coordinator, volunteer tutors and at least 20 people interested in completing their basic education (elementary to high school).
With a placement test, Angelicum sets the initial grade level of a learner, who then fills out a form to indicate official enrollment in the college. Donadillo and her co-facilitators then return to the campus to make the learning modules, have them printed, and send them to the volunteer coordinator by bus, ship or plane.
Each learner gets a set of the printed modules in all subjects. His/her active role is ensured by the volunteer coordinator in terms of self-paced learning, one-on-one interactions with volunteer tutors in the learning site, when to take achievement tests; and the conduct of oral examinations and retests.
“Yes, we allow retakes, depending on the request,” says Donadillo.
Assessments determine movement to the next level per subject area. A learner who has mastered the basic competencies for basic education, as prescribed by the Department of Education, gets an Angelicum diploma.
