Implementation of Sinaka Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education in Indigenous Peoples Education Curriculum: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

The practice of mother tongue in teaching kindergarten and primary levels are of great help to strengthen the foundation of early years of education in improving pupils’ basic learning skills. It is designed to implement learner-centered education from the beginning of the education ladder and this is apparent in a rising number of educational programs that utilize this approach. As such, little is known about how a national policy for MTB-MLE can be disseminated into contextualized local schools. To capture the breadth of conceptual and implementation issues, purposive sampling was used in this study to determine the teachers, tribal parents, and leader perspectives. Focus group discussion was done using transcript-based analysis to gather first-hand information. Findings derived and identified four main themes, namely (1) teachers’ unpreparedness of MTB-MLE implementation, (2) teachers’ difficulty in delivering MTB-MLE, (3) fear of Manobo Language endangerment, and (4) inadequacy of contextualized and indigenized IMs. Hence, it is commended that these issues must be addressed efficiently to shift the perspective of the teachers in using the Manobo Language in their school. The implementation needs better encouragement, support, and motivation for the teachers to embrace the challenges brought by MTB-MLE with an optimistic perspective to address certain gaps in its implementation.