|After 35 years, Sikolohiyang Pilipino gets world respect |
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|By Vincent Cabreza |
|Philippine Daily Inquirer |
|First Posted 11:08:00 12/29/2010 |
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|Filed Under: Children, Culture (general) |
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|GOOD SAMARITANS have started reaching out to children who are caught in a violent conflict or a debilitating cataclysm, using a |
|psychological tool designed by a Filipino 35 years ago. |
|Dr. Rogelia Pe-Pua, head of University of New South Wales? School for Social Sciences and International Studies in Australia, says |
|donors used to ship toys to these children to help them cope with trauma. |
|But the toys were often too strange to them. Pe-Pua says many ended up tucked in shelves or wrapped in closets ?because they are too |
|expensive to be smashed at play time.? |
|Some foreign experts shrugged off this phenomenon, suggesting instead that the donors teach the children how to play with them, she |
|says. |
|According to her, there are even stories about a Japanese expert who injects the children with ?happy enzymes.? |
|Those days have passed. |
|Trauma programs |
|The United Nations Children?s Fund (Unicef) now uses a program framework that puts value in culture, indigenous identity and the |
|environment to help explain or define behavior that is peculiar to a certain country or race, Pe-Pua says. |
|Elizabeth Protacio-De Castro, a Filipino consultant, reviewed the trauma programs of 16 counties before coming out with a template that|
|tells Unicef who the child beneficiary is, how culture shapes him, how the environment abuses him and what he truly needs to help him |
|cope. |
|Pe-Pua says Unicef uses a mechanism known to the teachers and students as Sikolohiyang Pilipino, a 35-year-old academic movement that |
|is not simply a Filipinized-version of mainstream psychology. |
|When psychologist Virgilio Enriquez founded the movement in 1975, he encouraged students to write in Filipino to help them discover |
|indigenous perspectives about life, scientific knowledge and social relationships, which are lost when behavior is couched in a foreign|
|language or theory. |
|The country?s psychologists learned that their counterparts abroad had started adapting Enriquez?s methodology when they assembled in |
|November for the 35th Sikolohiyang Pilipino conference at the University of the Philippines Baguio. |
|Indigenous psychology |
|The world now interprets Sikolohiyang Pilipino, or simply SP, as ?indigenous psychology,? which allows professionals to see the world |
|from the perspective of the people they serve, says Pe-Pua, one of the founding members of the Pambansang Samahan sa Sikolohiyang |
|Pilipino (PSSP or the National Association for Filipino Psychology). |
|Pe-Pua, a former UP professor, conducted a two-month study of 20 academics this year to determine the progress made by the SP. She |
|discovered that the methodology had become a multidisciplinary tool for various professions in the country ?as it was originally |
|intended.? |
|An essay, published online by the National Historical Institute, states that Enriquez ?defined Philippine psychology as the embodiment |
|of the scientific study of ethnicity, society and culture of a people and the formal application to psychological practice of core |
|knowledge rooted in a people?s ethnic heritage and consciousness.? |
|?According to Enriquez, the captive Filipino mind is sold to the idea that Filipinos do not have any indigenous religion and that the |
|religion of the country was borrowed from Spain and America. He further explained that denying the facts of a people?s history is |
|tantamount to denying their memory. A people without a memory of their past is also deprived of their future,? it points out. |
|Community advocacy |
|Pe-Pua says her survey indicates that the SP helped a prominent psychologist excel in community advocacy. ?Once you become part of a |
|community you intend to serve, you can?t help but search for native concepts and explanations which you must use to understand behavior|
|and phenomenon in a village,? she says. |
|The SP helped another academic design intervention programs for maternal health and reproductive health, which value a client?s |
|cultural background and ?pakikipag-kapwa? (sense of community) and treat participants as ?kapwa tao? (fellow beings), she says. |
|The Unicef framework for children caught in conflict areas or cataclysms best defines how far the SP has reshaped world view, she says.|
|The shift in perspective may mean that donors will soon send typhoon-displaced children basketballs, dolls and yo-yos that they know |
|how to play with rather than toys that require engineering backgrounds to put together, she says. |