Berkley Center

Background: As part of the Education and Global Social Justice Project, in July 2010 undergraduate student Brian Dillon interviewed Carmela Oracion, managing director of the Ateneo Center for Educational Development (ACED). In this interview she discusses the importance of community empowerment rooted in a commitment to service, opportunities for and obstacles to ACED's continued expansion, and working with local politicians. She also touches on the role of public health interventions in promoting a productive learning environment.

I know you have a long history with education at Ateneo. Tell me about that and how you came to direct ACED.

Going back to when I was in high school, I was choosing between heading to the University of the Philippines to study medicine, or to Ateneo to study math. I received a scholarship from Ateneo, attended, and began as a math teacher at Ateneo High School after I graduated. I worked in a series of new positions until I became principal for eight years.

While at the high school, we started to have Department of Education (DepEd) projects, the biggest of which was developing lessons guides for the public schools. This started my relationship with DepEd and the public schools, and they continues to ask and consult with us. When my term as high school principal ended in 2006, they asked me to handle ACED, and I came on board.

How have Ateneo’s Jesuit mission and your spiritual life affected your work and influenced the center?

We publicly profess that Ateneo forms men and women for others, so in a sense all this brainwashing has gotten us to where we have a predisposition to serve, not just as a missionary—but always there’s an attraction to be of service in some form. There is a desire to contribute to the common good. Whenever there are volunteer opportunities, for example doing rehab work after a typhoon, we have this predisposition to do it.

In my personal case, that predisposition affected my pursuit of a service-related position. After graduating with a math degree from Ateneo, I could have gone to a bank or somewhere else, but I wanted to be a teacher. And now that I’m over 40 years old, in midlife, I suddenly realized how quickly time goes by. There was only so much time to good, so I had to say yes. This [work with ACED] was an opportunity to do to scale those little things we’d been doing. After my term as principal, I wanted to teach in grade one—I know they still don’t believe me—but I came to realize this as a really concrete way of being a woman for others.

Also, with a program like ACED, the idea of a man or woman for others becomes an entire school for other schools. The center is a vehicle for teachers to be for other teachers, for students to be for other students. Being men and women for others can take many forms, and this was a way to do service also through something we do best. It’s an opportunity for the best students in town to be for other students. We can go to hospitals, visit old folks or orphanages, too—but this here is a big community to serve. We have to take advantage of our being a school—it’s something we do really well—and use it as a medium for service.

I realize though that the work in this is very big, and that we have to bring other people in to see its value in making things better. The students in a Jesuit school have a great desire to be helpful but need to be shown how do to the work in a manner that’s effective and efficient, because people can get tired of trying to be helpful when it gets nowhere. I want to make sure that people and their groups really do contribute to something.

So much of ACED’s approach looks to community empowerment. How does ACED empower those communities through working in the school? What does an empowered community look like?

I think somehow our work gives people out there the confidence that they can get themselves out of where they are. While a community’s transformation does rest on external factors, I think the seed, or the magic, for that transformation really lies in oneself and one’s own community. The important things we contribute are holding onto their hands and help them change themselves.

Many times in school reform, people tend to focus on giving things or improving technology. But it doesn’t work out because a school doesn’t have the capacity to absorb the improvement. We know that technology can be helpful, but we’ve given before, and nothing happens without other transformations happening first. That gave us a simple lesson: we have to give them the capacity, empowering leaders and teachers to be ready for those sort of improvements that can come later. It’s a matter of bridging a gap. A lot of the teachers are poor with their methods and content, so we need to address those handicaps first. It’s about giving them the confidence for transforming themselves and enabling them to move towards a point where they’re ready for innovation and more transformations.

The communities we work with are much neglected and wouldn’t be in these situations if people and the government had paid more attention to them in the first place. The families themselves are marginalized as people. We try to encounter communities and give them the attention to help them understand that they are important. Even physically it’s different. It’s important for the people we serve to be associated with an important institution like Ateneo. It’s like stepping into a different world.

What do you see as the ideal outcome for a community, and also an individual student, who have been successfully affected by ACED?

For a community, I see a school that is able to address its own problems. I’ve slowly seen it through leaders who can now approach agencies and local government officials to look for what they really need. The school hopefully solves its own problems and will be able to aim for greater things. We all know it can be easy in that situation to be and feel limited. But a school that could dream bigger when we work with them would show our success.

A successful student would be one who could perform better, who could improve in his exams or win at competitions, most simply. The work can be very direct in that way, as it bears fruit, concretely, right away. We also hope that there would be a sense of hope in the student—that they’d really aspire for a better future—due to Ateneo’s involvement in his or her school. It can be very hopeless down there sometimes.

I’m interested in what you see as the opportunities for and obstacles to ACED’s expansion and possible replication elsewhere.

The opportunities for expansion are great. Proof of that is in our increase from four to 400 schools over three years. We never invited ourselves to this scale; we’ve always been invited by the people we serve. We have pending requests, though, from people in other places for whom we are not quite ready yet. The reality is that we have 46,000 schools [across the Philippines] has to be our motivator. We want to be more than just a drop in the bucket. So, I guess the fact that word is getting around that we might be doing things right in a way and that people have invited us to work other places show our need to expand.

One limit to our expansion is really internal. We operate within the university and have to know that work like this isn’t usually the work of an institution like this. Because Ateneo is so concerned and the project of improving public education is so big, we are trying to bring it into the mainstream of the university.

We have seen bits and pieces of success, like the improving test scores, but education is a prolonged affair, and it takes a while to measure success and see if students really do make it to a better life. It’s very difficult to segregate our work in the public schools from the poverty that pulls us further and further into the community. Poverty is a vicious cycle, but we just have to keep pushing, as education is what is going to get people out of that poverty.

Do you worry that it will be difficult to ensure the local passion and community engagement that have made ACED successful?

I’m not afraid of that because in my work over four years, I’ve seen a lot of people trying to help—maybe not full-time, but they want to do what they can, and we can rely on that. I’m more scared of the capability in other places to replicate our work. Our teacher trainings haven’t worked as effectively when we partnered outside of ACED. Some of the teachers being trained from the public schools in Nueva Ecija may have been better skilled than the teachers we found to train them. We have to insure that quality in the training.

Tell me about your experiences working in politics and with politicians.

Well, with politicians you have to sing their tone. Like anything else, there are good politicians and bad politicians. Some people would like to crusade to change the bad politicians, but I would rather work with the good politicians and then let others follow their model. They can realize that doing really well in things like education and healthcare can also get them those votes they want.

You have to work with those willing to work with you, instead of working with politics as a whole. Sometimes the public education is itself highly politicized. Schools complain about people influencing the hiring and firing of teachers and moving principals around, which is tough.

We’ve realized the promise in working with local government officials rather than on a national level. The national level is too big, but locally so much can be done.

Where could ACED use help?

For replication, I’ve had it suggested, and wonder, can there be two of us, as in an equivalent center, somewhere else, like in Cebu? Again, we can hand the information over to whomever, but I ask, can somebody in, say Nueva Ecija have the capability to execute the program?

One big area we could use help in is research, as we really have so many things going on at one time. We could use some people, or volunteers, to synthesize what we’ve learned in many areas. I’ve seen in a few schools and am interested in identifying the factors that help specific students do really well.

We could use specific financial assistance, too, whether a partner wants to contribute for feeding programs or supplying instructional materials.

How do partnerships with groups like Health Development work?

For example, the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health makes a unique part of its training having students experience health issues out in the world, emphasizing the aspect of public health. One group has helped us set up things as basic as hand cleaning and tooth-brushing stations in the schools. These types of interventions have to fulfill specific needs; it can’t be teaching these skills, but actually providing them. Most of our students don’t even have the money to buy toothpaste or soap. They try to be resourceful and use other materials like fluoride drops instead of toothpaste, and other things like that as well.

The other side of the work is engaging medical professionals like dentists and ophthalmologists in the work. Everything we do is related to this Third World poverty, where absences can be due to things like toothaches and headaches, and students fail because they really need glasses and can’t even see the blackboard. People need to understand that.

We can’t limit our work to the educational world and ignore how poverty impacts a child’s performance in school.

Where do you see ACED partnerships with other organizations happening and expanding?

This year, we are seeing things like partnering with the Jollibee Foundation and are very excited that parents from Ateneo High School want to adopt projects for each class year.

Our expansion has really been amazing. I myself don’t know how it’s come to be, especially with a small staff. We do have a large base of volunteers, though, which helps a lot. Even the university students’ projects have been helpful for us. This work is really two-sided, too, as the students are not only doing service for the public schools but also being formed by the experience. We receive as we give and are formed by our work. I feel that even when students—some even come as punishment—are doing things like folding brochures or correcting exams, something is going on in their minds. They can see and think how about the reality for the poor. This kind of work can offer any volunteer the opportunity to both give and be formed.