We are indeed dealing with a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. The Philippines suffers natural and man-made vulnerabilities such as typhoons that occur throughout the year, earthquakes, and more recently, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. These challenges necessitated the establishment of the Education Futures Program. While the Philippines Basic Education Continuity Plan in response to the pandemic, DepEd recognized at that time the urgent need to “future proof” education. Nationwide education in futures thinking and foresight planning was needed to address the future learning needs of all children and building education resilience in times of crisis. This presentation provides an overview of the "Co-creating Learning Spaces for Improved Early Language Literacy and Numeracy in the Philippines" activity, under the USAID funded All Children Reading (ACR) - Philippines. Following a brief introduction to futures thinking and foresight planning, this presentation describes how school-level teams in the Philippines developed prototypes of learning spaces for the future that addressed anticipated needs of learners. We present the prototyping process centered on human centered design thinking, the way that school teams collected feedback on their innovations from teachers in the region, parents, and learners themselves, and a snapshot of the prototypes developed, and the benefit of the prototyping process to school teams and the relative success they had in realizing their future learning spaces innovations after two years.

In 2009 the Philippines introduced a mother tongue-based multilingual education language policy requiring the “mother tongue” as the language of instruction (LOI) in kindergarten through grade 3. Using teacher classroom language data collected from four LOI groups in 2019, we compared the frequency of teachers’ use of the target LOI in different contexts, including urban versus rural classrooms, classrooms with relatively homogeneous student language backgrounds versus more heterogeneous classrooms, and classrooms with materials in the target language versus classrooms without. We also examined language usage against characteristics of the teacher populations, including language background, years of experience, training, and beliefs about the best language for initial literacy. The results strongly suggest that the most influential levers for increasing teacher usage of a designated LOI in these contexts are ensuring that teachers are assigned to schools where the LOI matches their own first language and providing teaching and learning materials in the target LOI, especially teacher’s guides. These two factors were more strongly and more consistently correlated with teacher use of the LOI than all other variables examined. The linguistic homogeneity of the student population also showed a statistically significant though lower impact on teacher language usage. This document was developed with support from the American people through the United States Agency for International Development.

This presentation was delivered as part of the 2022 Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) conference as part of a panel describing the Education Futures research activity undertaken by the Philippines Department of Education, with support from USAID/Philippines through the All Children Reading-Philippines program managed by RTI International. Under this activity, leaders in DepEd are engaging in a range of courses and workshops to learn and apply futures thinking methodologies for reimagining how education can be delivered differently to address recurring shortcomings. The authors are Maricel Fernandez (Research Officer, RTI International) and Mark Sy (Manager of EdTech Unit, Department of Education).