DepEd expands mobile teaching program in Mindanao

PAGADIAN CITY, Zamboanga Del Sur , Philippines — The Department of Education (DepEd), through its Bureau of Alternative Learning System (BALS), has bolstered the implementation of its seven-year-old Mobile Teaching Program (MTP) in Mindanao as it increased to 609 the total number of its traveling mentors in the country’s second biggest island region for school year 2010-2011, it was learned here recently.

The DepEd move apparently sought to respond to the need of the fast growing number of school-age children and young adults who live in remote mountains or island villages without public elementary schools.

Region 9 Education Director Walter Albos said that the latest statistical data his office received from Dr. Carolina Guerrero, director of BALS (formerly known as Bureau of Non-Formal Education), showed that Mindanao was assigned last school year a total of 93 mobile tutors more than its previous school years’ allocations of 516 positions.

Guerrero also announced the initial designation of 745 school district ALS teacher-coordinators in Mindanao’s 63 provincial and city schools divisions which comprise a total of 1,647 districts.

A mobile teacher (MT) who receives a monthly salary equal to that of a regular mentor plus travelling allowance, is deployed by DepEd to a far-flung school-less barangay or sitio whose local school-age youngsters could not enroll in a regular public school owing to the far distance of their homes.

Guerrero said that before the enforcement of the DepEd’s MTP, remote community school-age children never had the opportunity to enter a classroom and consequently grew up as virtual illiterates like most, if not all, of their parents.

BALS Region 9 chief Virginia Amiruddin said that a traveling mentor, armed with various instructional modules, usually gathers with the help of community leaders a group of 10 to 40 school-age learners and young adults, and organizes them into a non-graded class often using a village chapel, if any, or a huge tree-shaded area as a classroom.

Using the local dialect as medium of instruction, the mobile tutor teaches learners the basic literacy skills of Reading, ’Riting and ’Rithmetic (often known as the Three Rs) integrating into the lessons relevant livelihood skills and health and sanitation practices.

After some five months, when the learners shall have virtually mastered their basic literacy lessons, the MT travels to another distant community and repeats the same process.

Of Southern Philippines’ 63 schools divisions, Zamboanga del Sur was shared the biggest number of traveling teachers with 25 followed by North Cotabato, 24; Sultan Kudarat, 24; Bukidnon, 22; Agusan del Sur, 20; Zamboanga del Norte, 20; Davao del Sur, 19; Maguindanao, 19; Davao Oriental, 17, and Lanao del Norte, 17.