MY PURPOSE IN BECOMING A COLLEGE PROFESSOR
I first walked into a Tagalog classroom at Skyline College 15 years ago - a scared high school senior that wanted to learn more about my language, my culture, and who I was. I was lost and seeking a mentor to help me understand myself, my family, my community, and how to heal from the unspoken trauma that I couldn’t name, but was a constant presence everywhere I went. As a mixed-heritage youth of Filipino and Indian ancestry I didn’t have a sense of place or belonging. When I didn’t get the answers or the sense of community that I needed at the junior college, I turned to an alternative learning space, one that was much more inviting and nurturing – the hula halau. Within that space, I learned ways of knowing that were completely contrary to what I had been taught in school, yet were also completely natural to me. The halau was where I began my own process of decolonization and where I was able to see myself as a spiritual and intellectual being worthy of sharing my voice/story with the world.
I struggled as a community college student, bouncing around taking various courses for over two years, until I ended up leaving school and working three jobs. Upon returning to school through an Associate of Arts program at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM), I was still lost trying to find a career path that was fun and interesting. It was while at FIDM that I was finally able to transfer to San Francisco State University (SFSU) in order to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree. Unfortunately, I bounced around from major to major and even found myself on academic probation for three semesters. It was finally in Asian American Studies, where I was surrounded by faculty and curriculum that was rooted in my community and experiences that I was familiar with that I began to succeed academically.
I know that I would not have been able to navigate my way through higher education into graduate studies if not for the extended family in halau that taught me to see myself as an academic. In halau, I was exposed to a support system that was multi-generational and I was able to network with indigenous scholars who taught at the community college and university level. It was that exposure to academics that looked like me and that I could relate to and converse with on a human level that allowed me to see academia as something that I could connect to. I was able to engage with scholars who valued both traditional knowledge systems as well as high level academic theory. The way they were able to reconcile and interweave two seemingly oppositional knowledge systems was fascinating. They were able to deconstruct the dialectic of high vs. low culture that I had been taught both by my family and in my schooling. Prior to that, I had internalized my parent’s colonial message that college was just something that I had to do in order to get a job that would keep me in middle class status quo comfort. It was the support of my mentors in Asian American Studies at SFSU and my mentors from halau that motivated me to pursue graduate school.
15 years after that first Tagalog class, having completed an Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Asian American Studies and working extensively with Filipino American youth at the high school and community college level, I have transformed my many questions and doubts into my purpose. College is no longer just a tool to get a high paying job, but a tool to liberation. When I was younger, I stopped caring about school and wanted nothing more than to get a job that would afford me a simple middle-class life. Now, I see college as a place where I can make a difference in the lived of young people. I have seen too many youth get burnt out by a schooling system that they are not invested in and that is not invested in them. I see them wandering around the community college campuses lost, only there because college is something they are supposed to do as opposed to something that can be exciting and liberating. I want to be that critical educator at the college level that can grab students like me that are lost and disillusioned by an educational system that is hostile to them. I want to provide more opportunities for Filipina/o American youth and other youth of color to see and involve themselves in higher education.
For the last five years, I have been blessed to be able to work at multiple school sites in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) through an organization known as Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP). PEP is a service-learning pipeline that aims to nurture community development through social justice education. It is a service learning pipeline that connects students and teachers from Kindergarten through Graduate level through curriculum rooted in Filipina/o American history and experience. As a teacher intern and site coordinator at both the high school and community college level, I have seen how powerful curriculum that is relevant and responsive can be in fostering student engagement and a sense of community. Additionally, having been fortunate enough to loop some of my students from high school to community college, I have really seen the pitfalls and struggles that youth face in the transition from high school to college. My students and mentees have made me painfully aware of where the gap lies between a structured high school setting and the independence of a college education. I have seen how they can get lost trying to navigate the college system. I want to redevelop the curriculum of Philippine Studies in order to incorporate some more indigenous theory and decolonizing pedagogy to help address these issues. A lot of the issues that affect retention of Filipina/o American youth are connected to the colonial history of the Philippines and of Filipina/os in America. Indigenous theory and decolonizing pedagogy offer a grounding that is vital to help focus these youth and help them find their purpose. The safety and nurturing of halau, critical Asian American Studies, and the transformative pedagogical praxis of PEP in combination have been the catalyst of my decolonization process and development of my identity as a mixed-heritage Filipino American. My confidence in my identity and abilities comes out of this synthesis of these aforementioned theories and pedagogies and have informed my personal pedagogical praxis.
As a graduate student in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, I examined the unspoken toxicity in the Filipina/o American community that I call hegemonic trauma, similar to Eduardo Duran’s concept of the Soul Wound (2006), which is the collective residual trauma that remains on a people after colonization and genocide. I conducted in-depth interviews with seven Filipina/o Americans who acknowledge undergoing a process of “indigenization.” Through these interviews, multiple themes emerged that illustrated the depth and universality of hegemonic trauma among Filipina/o American families. The interviews also illustrated healthy ways to confront, transform, and heal from the trauma. I took the findings from my interviews, current scholarship on indigenous knowledge systems and psychology, and my own personal experiences with indigenous communities in the Philippines and the United States to develop a pedagogical philosophy that seeks to confront, combat, and transform hegemonic trauma through transforming epistemology by reclaiming indigenous knowledge systems.
I want to further the research that I have done previously by taking it from the theoretical to the practical. For me, critical pedagogy is a constant praxis. While I have begun to develop this concept of Critical Kapwa Pedagogy, I want to continue to develop it further into a curriculum. As an incoming first year Ph.D. student in Education-Curriculum Studies, my research will focus on a comparative analysis and synthesis of indigenous education models in Hawai’i, New Zealand, and the Philippines, charting the practical applications of such an analysis in public education at the secondary and post-secondary educational levels. I hope to further explore what a decolonized Filipina/o epistemology looks like and how to apply that in a classroom setting. I want to break away from deficit-based models of education and examine successful strength-based models. I also hope to develop a curriculum that facilitates growth and healing on both an individual and community level.
Earning a doctorate in education is more than just a step on my path towards my ultimate goal of teaching at the college level and doing research. I truly want to be that professor that knows and understands his students and is invested in their education and growth. I want to be able to offer a classroom that provides a healing, nurturing place that can be the catalyst for decolonization and healing for students that don’t see themselves in college. My dream is to one day return to City College of San Francisco, the community college that I started at as an undergrad and help those students that are just like I was. I also want to really develop the TULAY retention and recruitment program that targets Filipina/o American and Pacific Islander students at City College to really make it achieve it’s purpose of addressing the retention issue that those students face.
I struggled as a community college student, bouncing around taking various courses for over two years, until I ended up leaving school and working three jobs. Upon returning to school through an Associate of Arts program at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM), I was still lost trying to find a career path that was fun and interesting. It was while at FIDM that I was finally able to transfer to San Francisco State University (SFSU) in order to pursue a Bachelor’s Degree. Unfortunately, I bounced around from major to major and even found myself on academic probation for three semesters. It was finally in Asian American Studies, where I was surrounded by faculty and curriculum that was rooted in my community and experiences that I was familiar with that I began to succeed academically.
I know that I would not have been able to navigate my way through higher education into graduate studies if not for the extended family in halau that taught me to see myself as an academic. In halau, I was exposed to a support system that was multi-generational and I was able to network with indigenous scholars who taught at the community college and university level. It was that exposure to academics that looked like me and that I could relate to and converse with on a human level that allowed me to see academia as something that I could connect to. I was able to engage with scholars who valued both traditional knowledge systems as well as high level academic theory. The way they were able to reconcile and interweave two seemingly oppositional knowledge systems was fascinating. They were able to deconstruct the dialectic of high vs. low culture that I had been taught both by my family and in my schooling. Prior to that, I had internalized my parent’s colonial message that college was just something that I had to do in order to get a job that would keep me in middle class status quo comfort. It was the support of my mentors in Asian American Studies at SFSU and my mentors from halau that motivated me to pursue graduate school.
15 years after that first Tagalog class, having completed an Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Asian American Studies and working extensively with Filipino American youth at the high school and community college level, I have transformed my many questions and doubts into my purpose. College is no longer just a tool to get a high paying job, but a tool to liberation. When I was younger, I stopped caring about school and wanted nothing more than to get a job that would afford me a simple middle-class life. Now, I see college as a place where I can make a difference in the lived of young people. I have seen too many youth get burnt out by a schooling system that they are not invested in and that is not invested in them. I see them wandering around the community college campuses lost, only there because college is something they are supposed to do as opposed to something that can be exciting and liberating. I want to be that critical educator at the college level that can grab students like me that are lost and disillusioned by an educational system that is hostile to them. I want to provide more opportunities for Filipina/o American youth and other youth of color to see and involve themselves in higher education.
For the last five years, I have been blessed to be able to work at multiple school sites in San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) through an organization known as Pin@y Educational Partnerships (PEP). PEP is a service-learning pipeline that aims to nurture community development through social justice education. It is a service learning pipeline that connects students and teachers from Kindergarten through Graduate level through curriculum rooted in Filipina/o American history and experience. As a teacher intern and site coordinator at both the high school and community college level, I have seen how powerful curriculum that is relevant and responsive can be in fostering student engagement and a sense of community. Additionally, having been fortunate enough to loop some of my students from high school to community college, I have really seen the pitfalls and struggles that youth face in the transition from high school to college. My students and mentees have made me painfully aware of where the gap lies between a structured high school setting and the independence of a college education. I have seen how they can get lost trying to navigate the college system. I want to redevelop the curriculum of Philippine Studies in order to incorporate some more indigenous theory and decolonizing pedagogy to help address these issues. A lot of the issues that affect retention of Filipina/o American youth are connected to the colonial history of the Philippines and of Filipina/os in America. Indigenous theory and decolonizing pedagogy offer a grounding that is vital to help focus these youth and help them find their purpose. The safety and nurturing of halau, critical Asian American Studies, and the transformative pedagogical praxis of PEP in combination have been the catalyst of my decolonization process and development of my identity as a mixed-heritage Filipino American. My confidence in my identity and abilities comes out of this synthesis of these aforementioned theories and pedagogies and have informed my personal pedagogical praxis.
As a graduate student in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, I examined the unspoken toxicity in the Filipina/o American community that I call hegemonic trauma, similar to Eduardo Duran’s concept of the Soul Wound (2006), which is the collective residual trauma that remains on a people after colonization and genocide. I conducted in-depth interviews with seven Filipina/o Americans who acknowledge undergoing a process of “indigenization.” Through these interviews, multiple themes emerged that illustrated the depth and universality of hegemonic trauma among Filipina/o American families. The interviews also illustrated healthy ways to confront, transform, and heal from the trauma. I took the findings from my interviews, current scholarship on indigenous knowledge systems and psychology, and my own personal experiences with indigenous communities in the Philippines and the United States to develop a pedagogical philosophy that seeks to confront, combat, and transform hegemonic trauma through transforming epistemology by reclaiming indigenous knowledge systems.
I want to further the research that I have done previously by taking it from the theoretical to the practical. For me, critical pedagogy is a constant praxis. While I have begun to develop this concept of Critical Kapwa Pedagogy, I want to continue to develop it further into a curriculum. As an incoming first year Ph.D. student in Education-Curriculum Studies, my research will focus on a comparative analysis and synthesis of indigenous education models in Hawai’i, New Zealand, and the Philippines, charting the practical applications of such an analysis in public education at the secondary and post-secondary educational levels. I hope to further explore what a decolonized Filipina/o epistemology looks like and how to apply that in a classroom setting. I want to break away from deficit-based models of education and examine successful strength-based models. I also hope to develop a curriculum that facilitates growth and healing on both an individual and community level.
Earning a doctorate in education is more than just a step on my path towards my ultimate goal of teaching at the college level and doing research. I truly want to be that professor that knows and understands his students and is invested in their education and growth. I want to be able to offer a classroom that provides a healing, nurturing place that can be the catalyst for decolonization and healing for students that don’t see themselves in college. My dream is to one day return to City College of San Francisco, the community college that I started at as an undergrad and help those students that are just like I was. I also want to really develop the TULAY retention and recruitment program that targets Filipina/o American and Pacific Islander students at City College to really make it achieve it’s purpose of addressing the retention issue that those students face.