Prior to my field experience, I’ve developed the following guiding question: How do Filipino educators employ local history, cultural identity, and community experiences to foster civic engagement, cultural relevancy, and global competency, and how can these approaches inform social studies instruction in my own community?
One of the main reasons I selected this question concerns the fact that it is positioned directly at the intersection of my daily work as a social studies teacher and my long-term vision for curriculum design. Teaching high school history classes while leading teacher preparation coursework keeps me grounded in two distinct worlds: the immediate, practical realities of high school classrooms and the broader, structural methodologies of teacher education. In both realms, I’ve noticed that standard social studies instruction often struggles to bridge the gap between abstract academic concepts and the lived realities of students. Framing my work around this question offers a deliberate attempt to break that pattern to explore how educators ground learning in local history and cultural context to turn passive instruction into meaningful civic action.
My explicit choice to examine local history, cultural identity, and community experiences reflects a firm belief that effective social studies instruction begins with place. As a teacher in his seventeenth year in the classroom, it is more than apparent that students connect most deeply with historical and civic concepts when they see their own communities, struggles, and heritage reflected and represented in the narrative – in an authentic way, of course. Observing how Filipino educators will leverage local pride and community history to cultivate global competency provides a vital lens for re-examining our own practices back in the States. Cultural relevancy and global competency are not add-ons or a single thematic unit; they should function as the foundational foundation for rigorous, critical thinking. By examining how teachers navigate these intersections under unique societal and historical dynamics, I seek to learn actionable strategies that empower future teachers to construct culturally grounded, place-based curricula.
It must also be stated that equally important is the explicit focus on reciprocity and elevation within my guiding question. Too often, international educational research adopts an extractive lens, in ways that treat host communities merely as data points or passive research subjects. My main goal is to frame this inquiry around mutual learning to ensure the focus remains on honoring and uplifting the expertise of local Filipino teachers and celebrating not just their pedagogical strengths, but their community and culture as well. As educators, we have much to teach and much to learn.
