A rough sail for learner-centred education as a global reform policy in the Philippines

Abstract

ABSTRACT Learner-centred education has become a global reform policy among Southeast Asian countries including the Philippines. This policy however raised critical issues in pedagogy as it placed learner-centred teaching in binary opposition with teacher-centred instruction, thus creating a simplistic dichotomy between good and bad teaching in the Philippines. With this research problem, this study used ethnographic methods to examine teacher and students’ understanding of what constitutes good pedagogy in one class within an urban public school in the Philippines. Ethnographic findings suggest that teacher-centred pedagogies are still valued by the students and teachers in this study not only as practices of good teaching but most importantly, as enactments of ‘academic care’. This ‘academic care’ provides an important orientation towards understanding how learner-centred pedagogies could be articulated for the Filipino context and could offer a possibility which bridges the presumed dichotomy between learner-centred and teacher-centred pedagogies in the Philippines.