By: Maria Victoria V. Tiquis
Head Teacher II – Mathematics
San Jose Integrated High School
As the Department of Education Mission stated “To protect and promote the right of every Filipino to quality, equitable, culture-based and complete basic education…”, it is a challenge that teachers as educators should have the impetus to emphasize and give true importance on culture and education to the generation of youth nowadays and put culture not in oblivion but at the front and center and integrate them in the lessons, hence, PEMA ( Program on EthnoMathematics Awareness) was implemented since 2019 up to the present. This is a special innovative project on designing culture-based instructional materials wherein the corner stone is Ethnomathematics.
San Jose Integrated High School’s PEMA has been one of the best practices of the school as it includes localized and contextualized instructional materials for students. These includes lesson exemplars, localized video lessons, comics or illustrative stories, and digital audio-visual stories which cater to diverse learners and serve as catalyst in the new normal. Action researches were offshoots of this, one was about the localized pre-recorded video lessons which was supported by DepEd through BERF and the recipient of Best Paper Award during the 2021 VCBER (Virtual Conference for Basic Education Researchers) and the other was about the teaching materials based on Ethnomathematics which has also been published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Advanced Education and Technology (APJAET) conference proceedings in the 2nd Asia Pacific Conference on Multidisciplinary Research (APCMR) which was held on July 30-31, 2022.
This innovative program was at first designed for the Mathematics subject but later on other subject areas were inspired to design culture-based educational materials and as proof of this is our school’s pool of contextualized materials. To support the “Brigada Pagbasa”, the comics designed by Mathematics teachers were used as Reading Mathematics Stories to increase both numeracy and literacy rate, thus, anchored to the Reading Program of the school since these materials are being used in our Mobile Library.
The institutionalization of PEMA was held at the San Jose Integrated High School Function Hall on April 29, 2022 and was attended by School Principals, Supervisors, District Supervisors, teachers, parents and students. It was attested by San Pablo City Schools Division Superintendent Ms. Daisy Miranda, ASDS Mr. Buddy Chester Repia, CID Chief Mr. Vincent Ilagan, SGOD Ms. Annaliza Banayo, and LRM Supervisor Mr. Henry Contemplacion.
