Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in July 2010 undergraduate student Brian Dillon interviewed Jose Paolo O. Loanzon and Timothy Salera, students in their third year at Ateneo de Manila University pursuing degrees in development studies. In this interview they discuss their involvement with the Ateneo Center for Educational Development (ACED), which they are studying as the basis for an academic paper they are writing for classes on community development and social change taught by Socrates Valenzuela. The students joined ACED staff Emma Fawcett and Ross Lu on a program evaluation trip to Payatas C Elementary School, completing class observation reports and taking notes on focus group discussions with teachers and parents at the school.
How did you guys come to work on development studies, and then participate in this project with ACED?
Timothy Salera: Our main community development class is about looking how different NGOs try to solve a certain population’s problem. It focuses on the community organizer and his or her roles in the different organizations we encounter. We have three hours of class once a week, half of which is with a speaker from a particular field and half of which is a discussion on that topic. The topics can include everything from groups working with indigenous people, to Gawad Kalinga, to Pakisama, which is a group focused on helping farmers and other people involved in agrarian reform, to housing and poverty issues—basically anything related to social justice.
Jose Paolo O. Loanzon: It’s all about how people can interact with a community to help that community work its way out of poverty. The class asks us how that poverty can be solved. Our stance is essentially to use the approach of education to work on community development. So, our teachers set us up with ACED. We’re doing a research paper and helping out with this work related to it.
Salera: ACED asks that we help profile different schools and see how ACED has impacted those communities. We’re in the planning stages of going into the communities themselves to see how a community as been affected as its school has been impacted by ACED.
Loanzon: We really want to see ACED’s trickle down effect on a community.
How has working with ACED had an effect on the work you would like to do in the future?
Salera: I am still trying to see what field to focus on. I hope this project will help add insights and give me perspectives. I am starting to see strategies on perhaps how a government can work to solve these issues.
I like to look at the teachers’ and principals’ strategies given a situation where the budget is low, and maybe not even reaching the school itself. If I see it here, why not bring these lessons somewhere else, like where I am from. Essentially, I want to see the resourcefulness of schools in dealing with their situation. If it is possible for a school to educate well without resources, maybe other schools could see this too, and learn from their experiences. Sometimes people have the notion that they don’t have the resources so they can’t do anything, and hopefully we can change that.
Loanzon: My entire family—other than my parents—are teachers. They decided to put an effort into learning English when it was first brought to the Philippines. My great-grandfather was a military medic who eventually collected many books on medicine to teach other people, while his brothers and sisters became teachers. My grandfather was initially going to join the navy, but his exemplary grades led him into a more intellectual path of social research and eventually teaching in De La Salle, Ateneo, and Arellano universities. We were the first to learn it and worked on education, so it’s in my blood, and I’ve always been interested in education.
Salera: We were both actually business management majors and realized that we wanted to do development work. Then within that, we chose education as our focus for this project. A dilemma of people who want to go into teaching is the low salary, for sure. People question whether they can support their family, even if I really want to teach. Another challenge is that most experienced teachers are going overseas, and it’s a big loss for the Philippines. Because of this, some of the schools are further impaired, and that’s a problem for the Philippines as whole.
Loanzon: As much as possible, I’d like to be a teacher. But there are a lot of other expectations for somebody, having gone to such a good high school and now a great private university.
How has Ateneo’s Jesuit mission affected you and driven you to do this sort of work?
Salera: I’ve been in Jesuit schools since kindergarten—for elementary and high school and Xavier in Cagayan de Oro—and now at Ateneo de Manila [University]. I’ve always viewed the Jesuits as people I really look up to. I’ve had many friends who are Jesuits, originally from the Philippines and other places.
I think for me, what really permeated was the Ignatian spirituality; what really struck me was giving and not counting the cost, and living ad majorem dei gloriam. It also made me comfortable with silence—acting, reflecting on that action, and then acting again. I have to step back and do a sort of evaluation, asking, “Am I really doing the right thing?”
I’ve been affected by their idea of a liberal education as well. I don’t know if different orders do the same, but I’m impressed by the way the Jesuits think. For example many of the theologians who work on liberation theology are Jesuits, and those sorts of teachings aren’t even really recommended by the church. They’re not afraid of that difficulty and are comfortable with perplexity and seeing the importance of questioning society’s paradigms.
The final important thing for me is doing the examination of conscience at the end of the day. I ask, “What have I done for Christ, what am I doing for Christ, and what I ought do for Christ?” and that really helps.
Loanzon: I’ve also been affected originally by the Christian Brothers. I went to La Salle Green Hills High School. One of the biggest things for me was when I was invited to become a brother. I’m not even a Catholic and turned them down, but I was pushed towards these ideas in terms of my personal development. They pushed me towards working on education and actually told me to go to Ateneo, because of the good social program. LaSalle and Ateneo is mostly just a basketball rivalry anyway.