Despite facing challenges, due to the lack of school infrastructure and resources, she has witnessed the great impact of learners’ achievements on their families and communities.
ALS teachers often go beyond the call of duty, traveling long distances from one learning venue to another, working overtime or using personal tools, to provide differentiated learning activities in an attempt to meet learners’ various interests and capabilities.
My journey as an ALS teacher has always been challenging, but it deepened my understanding of others, and made my life better. Teaching in the ALS requires a tremendous amount of patience to effectively survive in the field. It also requires a flexible and appropriate alternative learning programme and adapted tools. Learners need it to discover their talent, improve their life skills and transform their lives.
UNESCO and DepEd partnered to improve the quality of the non-formal education, and ensure inclusive education through an intensified ALS. Enhanced ALS curriculum, 100 new ALS modules, and capacity-building trainings for girl-learners and teachers, helped to increase the number of successful out-of-school girls. Besides, an education center has been constructed to bring ALS learners and teachers together.
The UNESCO training programs and new tools for life-long skills such as entrepreneurship, information literacy, financial management, widened Ms Silleza’s horizon. She felt better equipped to help out-of-school youths and adults overcoming challenges, and ensure that learners, especially girls who cannot commit to formal schooling due to various social, economic, geographic and cultural factors, are given a chance to learn.
The UNESCO trainings gave us the opportunity to explore the new Teachers’ guidebooks and Students’ workbooks and get familiar with it. The new center will also help expand the ALS and increase learners’ motivation to complete basic education.
The multi-functional Girls Education Center will be inaugurated in 2023, addressing the infrastructure needs of the ALS programme in the Eastern Visayas Region. The place can welcome over 1,800 ALS girl-learners from Tacloban City, Palo (Leyte), and neighbouring municipalities with high poverty rates and intensely affected by disasters, such as the Super Typhoon Haiyan that struck the region in 2013.
The UNESCO project Better Life for Out-of-School Girls to Fight Against Poverty and Injustice in the Philippines, helps the Philippines to resolve basic education woes, in line with the new MATATAG agenda of the DepED. Supported by the Korea International Cooperation Office (KOICA), it promotes the right to quality education at all times, towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 4, through significant learning opportunities for an inspiring future.
