Held on the 6th Jun 2019
at 6pm to
7:30pm
This talk shares the evolution of the Indigenous Peoples’ Education (IPEd) program of the Philippine government. It presents both the institutional and substantive developments that have been made by the Department of Education since the program was rolled out in 2012, and identifies some of the challenges that came with its implementation. It will then describe how teachers in three different contexts are coping with some of these challenges to highlight the need from the experiences of other countries like Australia that have a long history of indigenous education. Despite these challenges, it argues the importance of strengths-based indigenous peoples’ education for the country’s indigenous students.
Refreshments from 5:30pm
About the speaker
Professor Wilfredo Vidal Alangui (Ph.D. in Mathematics Education, Auckland University) is an indigenous person belonging to the Northern Kankana-ey of Mt. Province in northern Philippines. He is a member of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of the Philippines Baguio, and teaches in the undergraduate and graduate mathematics programs of the department. He is a recipient of the 2019 Endeavour Executive Leadership award, which is supporting his visit at the University of Tasmania to work with his host supervisor, Dr. Greg Oates in the School of Education.
His research interest is mainly on the interplay of mathematics/mathematics education, and culture. He also works on Indigenous Peoples’ education, which branches into research that generally falls under Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices (IKSP). One of his recent works involved the development of an Indigenous Curriculum Framework in support of the Indigenous Peoples’ Education program of the Department of Education.
Prof. Alangui served as head of the Publications Program of UP Baguio’s Cordillera Studies Center and, from 2016-2018, was editor-in-chief of The Cordillera Review, the peer-reviewed journal of UP Baguio on Philippine Society and Culture. He was selected to be a member of the Task Force on Indigenous and Local Knowledge (TF-ILK) of the United Nations “UN Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services” (IPBES), for the period 2014-2018. The Task Force gives advice to the IPBES process on how to effectively engage ILK in its assessment work on biodiversity and ecosystem services.
