The Lived Experiences of San Beda College Alabang Facilitators in Fulfilling the Learning Needs of Marginalized Students

Abstract

Education is a fundamental basic human right. It is the aspiration of people regardless of race, ethnicity, color, religion, culture, and nationality. However, the global reality of poverty limits the opportunity of education for all. Education has become selective being enjoyed by the privileged few and deprived the majority of the underprivileged and the marginalized. Accordingly, marginalized students should be allowed to acquire literacy skills and other lifelong supports. With the opportunity and skills, the learners would be able to reach their full potential as productive individuals in a democratic society. The end is to empower him to achieve a better quality of life, and to accelerate his social mobility. The phenomenological method of analysis was used to uncover the meaning of individual experience by focusing on concrete experiential accounts grounded in the everyday life of each facilitator. The goal is to gain a better understanding and to provide a description of a phenomenon from their lived experiences. Thus one needs to be sensible and listen on how informants reacted to the question and how each articulated his/their feelings through words and narrations and the non-verbal cues. The major themes that emerged from the study include the Vicious cycle of poverty; The eminence of the ‘Other’; Nobility of teaching as a vocation; and Re-engaging the intention of the ALS program. To address the current issues and concerns, there is a need to re-engage the intention of the program, to go back to the primary objectives for sustainable educational assistance of the intended learners with skills development and livelihood initiatives. Alternative education requires a paradigm shift in people’s perceptions of delivering basic education. In an alternative learning system, facilitators struggle in addressing various needs of learners and dealing with existing issues and several concerns: inexperienced facilitators; inadequate instructional materials; the persistent financial difficulty of learners that needs urgent government intervention to address the constraints. With these concerns, continuous refinement of educational initiatives and a series of measures are shown in the priorities of both the government and private institutions. The efforts of educators are all directed for the refinement of the social status of the marginalized to the end of improving their economic and social mobility.