ANGARAY’S TAKE: Customizing education despite ASEAN 2015

CAGAYAN DE ORO CITY (BukidnonNews.Net/27 June) Harnessing the potentials of the people behind the creative industry is one objective of Arts Management Incentives, which I found very interesting. The Cultural Center of the Philippines recently brought together the artists, teachers, cultural workers, curators, film-makers, writers, designers and tourism officers for the gathering on June 25 to 26, 2015 in Xavier University. I contextualized the inputs of the speakers in reviewing a curriculum. Among those who spoke in the gathering were: Nestor Jardin on Creative Industry, Luwindela Concha on Copyright, Dennis Marasigan on Marketing the Arts, Steven Fernandez on Social Media Marketing and Diwa de Leon on Online Platform. The author with Diwa de Leon, one of the famous video-bloggers. Explore his craft in The String Player Gamer via youtube. Management program includes analysis, planning, implementation and control; and these four concepts are very fitting in curriculum development. At present, outcome-based curricula shape the content of higher education. It gears adjustments to learning processes, school structure and to the culture of the school itself. This educational perspective challenges both the educators and social scientists to work together and prescribe the best education. Analyzing the local needs of the community will guide the setting of goals of a particular school whose service must benefit first the locals. Though schools now have to gear up for the Asean 2015 but its accountability to the localities remains. Planning includes re-structuring of manpower and over-hauling of curricula to befit the characteristics and learning styles of today’s students. Computer-motivated learning requires computer-motivated teaching. This is one aspect of implementing a new educational landscape where we should find e-school, e-book, e-library, e-notebook and the like. Dr. Oscar B. Cabaňelez, president of Bukidnon State University (BSU), has recently declared the Quality Policy of BSU to assure the public of a high quality of service from the school. One philosophy of management is Societal Marketing Concept that goes beyond just achieving organizational goals and delivering goods to the market. Businessmen’s language explains this concept as the consideration of the society’s well-being; and individual’s well-being. With this philosophy, I go for customized education. Self-actualization, where school is an avenue, is a universal aim of education thus; it requires a personalized manner of learning and teaching. Customized education disbands cognitive uniformity and promotes diverse interpretation of knowledge. Customized education exalts the learner’s self. Customized education means I should know my students, their skills, interests, psychological condition or their needs and design a learning process to befit their level of readiness for intellectual engagement. This sounds unrealistic but ideal. Is there a space for customized education in the outcome-based curriculum? Could it be accommodated in the paradigm of the Philippine schools? Maybe. As I listened to varied discourses for two days in that activity sponsored by the Xavier Center for Culture and the Arts, I thought of ‘selling my products’ or promoting my subjects creatively by customizing my teaching material. I was just right then when www.balugto.blogspot was born in 2013 in Davao City with the intention of providing literature to my students and to any researchers whose interests are on the people, the places and the culture of Bukidnon. I’m still in the threshold of the digital world, at least, but I’m willing to work on a customized teaching. -From  bukidnonnews.net