The members of the UNESCO Chair partner institutions from Malawi, Ethiopia, Nepal, and the Philippines, together with their colleagues from UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning (UIL), presented their findings from their recent research studies during the first day of the webinar which took the form of a public conference.

The aim of the presentations was to explore the potential of family literacy in enhancing the learning prospects of both adults and youth. Presenters underscored various ways in which children and adults learn together as they share knowledge and skills in everyday life.

Discussions also centered on the roles of parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, and caregivers and members of the wider community in intergenerational learning. This also provided the opportunity to share their recent research projects, policies and practices relevant to family literacy, indigenous knowledge and new ways of learning.

The participation of Vizconde and Lontoc was part of the Global Research Translation Award (GRTA)-funded project on family literacy and indigenous learning.

According to Lontoc, who also teaches at the College of Education, the Country Project Lead of Family Literacy Research Team in the Philippines, said that based on their research, learning within families in the context of the Philippines is tightly linked with sustaining livelihoods. It is a learning process that could be best described as intergenerational knowledge transfer and “modelling.”

Among their participants, local knowledge forms a core part of sustaining livelihoods. They also added that family members and their immediate community engage with a diversity of texts as part of their everyday life and livelihoods; thus, creating literacy-rich environments.

On the second day of the webinar, the virtual World Café format was utilized which engaged key policy makers and practitioner in discussions which could develop policy implications. Lontoc served as the co-chair of Dr. Catherine Jere from the School of International Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA). This session aimed to build on the discussions from Day 1 and to explore how participants could take forward the research and practice insights that emerged from the previous day.

This international webinar was organized by the UIL, UEA, and UNESCO’s Section of Youth, Literacy and Skills Development.

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This project aims to examine the perspectives and practices of stakeholders that include pupils and parents, school leaders and teachers, university students and lecturers, raise their awareness of gender matters such as gender mainstreaming, sensitivity, and inclusion, particularly within marginalized sectors, and foster their context-sensitive reflections on gender equality in English Language Teaching (ELT).

Context-sensitive reflections on gender equality consider how social norms and power relations impact the lives and opportunities available to both men and women and young girls and young boys, while prioritizing the intersections of race, class, and gender.

Participating in the research are the 10 countries which are eligible to receive Official Development Assistance (ODA), according to the World Bank. These ODA countries are Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, China, Colombia, Indonesia, Morocco, Philippines, Ukraine and Vietnam.

This innovative research project hopes to highlight the contribution of English language education to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 5 on gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls by exploring the perspectives of stakeholders such as students, teachers, school leaders, and parents in embedding gender in English language teaching and contributing to debate surrounding discrimination, representations, stereotypes, and equity.

The project runs for 18 months from April 2021 until September 2022 and is funded by the British Council through its Widening Participation Research Grants. These grants are aimed at supporting research in ODA countries that improves the learning and teaching of the English language and that promotes economic development and welfare.

Dr. Lontoc, who teaches at the College of Education and the UST Graduate School, is also an active member of the Language in Education (LiE) research interest group at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of East Anglia, UK. Meetings among the research collaborators will be primarily virtual, according to Lontoc. She was selected to take part in this international research team based on her track record as researcher on topics that focus particularly on women’s literacy learning, gendered roles and identities within family learning, curriculum, and policies. Incidentally, she is also the Lead of the Community-Engaged Studies Research Interest Group of the UST Research Center for Social Sciences and Education.

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A team of researchers from the Research Center for Social Sciences and Education (RCSSED) led by Lontoc has been working with the rural woman farmers of Pinili, San Jose, Nueva Ecija, a province in the Central Luzon region known as the Rice Bowl of the Philippines. This research program is titled “Empowering women and youth in the agricultural sector through sustainable livelihood practices.”

The research, according to Lontoc, who teaches Research courses at the UST Graduate School and the College of Education, centers on helping the out-of-school youth and women-led organizations in marginalized communities in Nueva Ecija. Started in 2019, the research is expected to be finished in 2021.
Using collaborative programs in research, participants of the research project get expert assistance from the multi-disciplinary team from the University of Santo Tomas. Lontoc, an expert on adult literacy and intergenerational learning, helps manage, monitor, and coordinate the program with stakeholders.

Graduate School Asst. Dean Prof. Camilla Vizconde, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. Evalyn Abiog, Ph.D., and Asst. Prof. Katrina Ninfa Topacio, faculty members of the English Language Department, contribute their expertise in digital literacy, gender, and readability components of curriculum materials.

This research program combines Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach (SLA) operating within Freirean principles that entail the developing critical consciousness of structures of power and the realization of their own power, through praxis to take a collective action to address present challenges. This also involves collaborative efforts among government agencies, NGOs, research institutions, and women-led organizations.

The project is funded by the University through the funds allotted by the RCSSEd to its individual researchers involved in the project. In an online interview, Lontoc explained that support also comes from the Don Bosco Training Center and the Department of Agriculture in Nueva Ecija. The latter provides the participants with equipment, seeds, animals, and access to training opportunities.

The program also considers not only approaches to skills training in rural communities but also contextual factors which impact access and participation in training programs. Thus, it addresses issues such as challenges and opportunities in co-facilitating and co-producing knowledge in rural communities, practices that build on existing literacies of participants, and distribution of power across sectors to achieve social transformation in rural communities.
Focusing on her audience composed of Department of English faculty members, Lontoc explained that they could use their communication and social interaction skills in addressing the priorities of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs).

After presenting this research to colleagues from the English Language Department, Lontoc, during the Open Forum, called on her co-teachers to “Be involved.”
“We need your time, your passion, and compassion,” she ended.

The webinar was organized by Department Chair Assoc. Prof. Rachelle B. Lintao, Ph.D., Assoc. Prof. Ma. Regina Arriero was the Open Forum moderator.

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The study aims to “explore the (potential) effects of the pandemic to adult learning and education programs by drawing from reflections from contrasting contexts of the three countries,” namely, the Philippines, Afghanistan, and the United Kingdom. According to Lontoc, “findings from this research will form part of a policy brief which contains recommendations to the governments concerned on the means by which governments and non-state actors could be able to take into consideration the needs of adult learners as COVID-19 continues to rampage.”

This project will be managed by the British Association for Literacy in Development (BALID) and will be led by Dr. Ian Cheffy from Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and BALID, in collaboration with UEA UNESCO Chair team. 

The grant is given to the newly formed Transformare: A Network of Adult Literacy and Lifelong Learning Advocates. Lontoc and Topacio are the President and Secretary of Transformare, respectively. The network was launched on November 21, 2019 during the 1^st Gender, Adult Literacy, and Active Citizenship for Social Transformation (GALACST) International Conference in UST.

Lontoc and Topacio are researchers of the .

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 (RCSSED) researchers led by and her co-researchers, and received research grants under the Global Challenges Research Funds (GCRF) and the Global Research Translation Awards (GRTA). Both projects are led by the UNESCO Chair team of the University of East Anglia, United Kingdom in collaboration with its partners in Malawi (University of Malawi), Nepal (CERID), Ethiopia (Bahir Dar University), and the Philippines (University of Santo Tomas), as well as UNESCO Paris and UIL Hamburg, which will host international dissemination events. The GCRF project started on September 1, 2019 and will run for ten (10) months, while the GRTA project started a month later and will run for eighteen (18) months.

The GCRF Project: Interactive Stakeholders’ Workshops, Documentary Analysis and Ethnographic Studies

In collaboration with the UEA UNESCO Chair partner universities, comparative ethnographic studies will be conducted on indigenous approaches to inter-generational learning and knowledge creation, alongside documentary analysis of existing family literacy programs in these countries. The project includes research-policy interaction and dissemination activities to engage international, national, and local stakeholders. This also involves capacity building in relation to the research teams in each partner university where early career researchers and postgraduate students will be involved.

One of the activities supported by GCRF is the Postgraduate Forum on Adult Education 2019,which will be held at the University of Santo Tomas on November 9, 2019.��This is in response to challenges posed by communities to provide access to education, whether formal or non-formal, to all members of the society. Through the partnership between the Graduate School of the University of Santo Tomas and Research Center for Social Sciences and Education (RCSSED), this forum, with the theme, “Adult Literacy Programs and Family-Centered Practices in Community Building: Revisiting  the Roles of Philippine Higher Education” aims to raise debates on the changing landscapes of adult literacy, the drivers of change and its challenges. It also highlights how adult literacy programs have become instrumental in supporting families and building communities .

There will be presentations from various Higher Education Institutions which tackle the status of adult literacy programs implemented in their institutions alongside the discussion of challenges, issues and future directions for adult education and intergenerational learning. Through researches that are to be simultaneously conducted in Malawi, Ethiopia, Nepal and the Philippines, these GCRF-funded activities will contribute to national and international understanding about how family literacy policy and programs can contribute to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, particularly in relation to gender equality, health, agriculture and education.

GCRF-funded activities address educational and health inequalities in the countries and research sites, as well as other contexts. It is perceived that one major contribution of GCRF projects is to bring policy-makers’ and educators’ attention to the disparity between current mainstream approaches to adult/family literacy instruction and the ways in which adults and children learn in everyday life – and the importance of recognizing that such educational practice can negatively affect sustainable development.

These projects build directly on the UEA QR GCRF-funded UNESCO Chair International Workshop program held in Ethiopia (Bahir Dar, May 2019), where researchers and practitioners identified the neglect of adult literacy within the development policy framework at the national and international levels as a major issue that affects financially incapable women in particular. A concept of family literacy built on indigenous learning has emerged and will be developed in relation to policy formulation and implementation within each partner country.

With these successful grant applications, the UEA UNESCO Chair and its partner institutions are putting forward a new concept of family literacy based on ‘indigenous inter-generational learning,’ on the premise that about less than a billion adults – the majority of these are women – are reported to be functionally illiterate. It has often been the case that in terms of policy formulation and implementation, things are often wanting in matters of adult literacy, and not a priority of government policy-makers and executive leaders.

Experts have mentioned that adult literacy and learning are considered as the ‘tie that binds’ the whole gamut of the SDGs. The project’s goal is to show how a community-based inter-generational approach to family literacy and learning can contribute to the achievement of selected SDGs, when built on local and/or indigenous knowledge and practice. Family literacy and learning are captioned as a ‘transformative and innovative tool’ that works across generations, between and among institutions and through interdisciplinary collaboration.” As a sector-wide approach, family learning brings together the different components of early childhood and school education, youth and adult learning.

Through the conduct of action-oriented research with different groups from each country, the projects will developed an intensive grass-root approach to family literacy and learning, as deeply rooted in people’s everyday activities. Interactive stakeholder workshops will be held in each country to share findings, interrogate current adult literacy practices and integrate this new concept of family literacy and learning into national and international policy. The pertinent findings of the research projects in each of the country in focus will be disseminated across the world by the 700+ UNESCO chairs.

The GRTA Project: e-thnography: Exploring the potentials of family literacy and  virtual ethnography in achieving food security through  sustainable organic agricultural practices

The GRTA project will be based on action-oriented research on family literacy and indigenous learning in diverse contexts in the four participating countries. Stakeholder workshops at the local and national levels will share what ‘family and inter-generational learning’ means to these communities, along with the analysis of existing adult literacy policy programs. Practical guidelines for family literacy will be co-developed, which is hoped to be adapted by governments and NGO programs. Comparative analysis conducted across the four countries and outputs from the country-level workshops will form the basis of the research seminar in UIL, leading to new guidelines for family literacy. The partner university team in each country will also  produce a country-specific report for dissemination through UNESCO offices.

Under the GRTA scheme, the UST RCSSED team proposed a research project which aims to study how family literacy can build on indigenous learning in order to contribute to the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, particularly the gender equality (SDG5), health and nutrition (SDG3), agriculture (SDG2), and education (SDG4) goals. Using mobile technology, this study explores the potentials of intergenerational learning and virtual ethnography in promoting sustainable organic agriculture and food security in poor rural communities.

This study involves students from Don Bosco Training Center (DBTC) who are enrolled in Organic Agriculture Production NC II and members of women’s organizations together with their sons and daughters,  who are interested in engaging in organic agriculture and who are part of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) facilitated by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) in Pinili, San Jose, Nueva Ecija. Through this collaboration, youth will be seen as drivers of change by participating actively in addressing pressing community issues that impact their communities.

This study uses family literacy and learning as a transformative and innovative approach that works across generations, between institutions and through interdisciplinary collaboration. Furthermore, it seeks to understand more about how adults, children and young people learn and teach each other skills and knowledge in the community. This might be agricultural skills, like learning to herd animals, or new skills like using a mobile phone.

The project is linked to one of  the basic premises of the policy framework for food security of FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) of the United Nations which states that ‘in order for people to feed themselves according to their needs, they must possess the capabilities to produce their own food or they should obtain sufficient income to buy their food (FAO, 2017).’ This is related to one of the top priorities of the 2030 Agenda which considers agricultural initiatives and rural development as powerful tools to end poverty and hunger. This would  not only mean  a boost in crop yield but also an increase in economic opportunities in the agricultural sector.

Moreover, this project entails interdisciplinary research collaborations among colleges/faculties of the University of Santo Tomas. Colegio de San Juan de Letran, another Dominican institution, and Don Bosco Training Center, a technical vocational school, will also be involved. Lastly, local government units such as barangays, and government agencies (Department of Social Welfare and Development and the Department of Agriculture) will take part in this study.

One important contribution of UST RCSSED team to this GRTA project is the creation of web/mobile application. This app is for parents and youth to document their experiences, to access resources, to upload e-manuals, and to use this tool for project monitoring and dissemination with the teams in Ethiopia, Malawi, Nepal, and UK.

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