Agbayani Village Trip: Pride and Provocation

Once again, Bayan Scholars made our way to Agbayani Village in Delano; it's become a yearly tradition for our learning community. This year, we visited this historic site on November 7th and 8th, a few weeks after Filipino American History month. To prepare for the trip, we devoted class time to begin untangling the difference between history and heritage. We also studied sections from Dawn Mabalon's Little Manila is in the Heart to familiarize ourselves with the plight of Filipino farm workers and the significance of Delano.

SWC Professionals help Bayan Scholars Develop Networking Skills

Photo by Ernesto Rivera

As we grow, Bayan plans to offer a mentor program, matching scholars with professionals for all the benefits we know that mentorship provides. Even as we aren’t at a place - yet! - for a full-blown mentor program as  PUENTE has, we can still help students develop skills they will need to make the most of mentor opportunities such as networking, introducing ourselves, asking questions - those “soft skills” that can make a huge difference. 

To that end, we set up a “mixer event” where students and Southwestern College professionals met “cocktail party-style” (there was no alcohol - just candy!) to practice meeting and greeting each other.

We broke the program up over a few days, reserving a portion of two class periods of Personal Development to prepare for the event. On the first day, students composed and practiced informal “elevator pitches,” quick self-introductions students might make when meeting a new teacher, prospective employer, or other person who they meet. The pitches we practiced were less formal than those proposed by Forbes or LinkedIn. Ours were intended for a more casual, low stakes situation. Folks jotted down their elevator pitches and practiced in front of the class and in pairs. 

Bayan Scholars Reflect on History & Heritage

October is Filipino American History Month, a commemoration instituted in 1991 by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) to preserve, disseminate, and celebrate the history of Filipinos and Filipinas in the United States. To mark the event, we spent time in our English class considering what we know about our experiences in the USA. 

To get started, we used our writer’s notebook to generate and organize our ideas. The following questions focused our thinking:

• What do you think you know about Filipina/Filipino American history? How did you acquire that knowledge? 
• What's the difference between "history" and "heritage"?

Pop Up Claims - Developing Ideas Worth Writing About

This post features Bayan's experiment with an activity cribbed from Dave Stuart, Jr.’s Let’s Make Teaching Better called “pop up debates”. Stuart’s process calls for single arguable point, but we focused instead on coming up with claims and verbally reporting those opinions with the rest of the class. We wanted to build confidence to come up with and publicly share opinions worth knowing.

This semester, we are studying Kevin Nadal’s book Filipino American Psychology. Together, we read the first two chapters. Chapter One provides a super brief sketch of Filipinas and Filipinos in the United States, demographics, how we got to the US, and the psychological impact of our history and place in US society. The second chapter focuses on Filipino values. As very few Bayan students had any formal coursework on Filipina/o American issues, we needed shared pool of knowledge these chapters offered.

After working through those chapters, we briefly examined the themes of the other chapters. Topics ranged from Racial and Ethnic Identity Development to Gender/Sexuality/Sexual Orientation, from the Model Minority Myth to Colonial Mentality. Subsequently everyone selected two to read beyond the ones we had studied together. We read these new chapters with the aim of teaching what we discovered with each other.

Identity & History: Reflecting on Fil Am History Month

October is Filipinx American HIstory month. Bayan Scholars investigated various historical topics, themes they had rarely explored, if at all,  prior to joining the Bayan Learning Community. 

This blog entry is the second installment of student responses to Pilipinx American History Month activities at Southwestern college as well as coursework in our Bayan classes. These responses tended to be more about internal, psychological issues as opposed to the more historically inflected responses from the first installment, Reclaiming History. 

These particular responses demonstrate the complicated relationship between history and psychology. They begin to uncover the nuanced and often hidden ways material history can condition one's sense of self. While Bayan scholars (students and faculty alike!) recognize that identity is not reducible to history and material conditions, we are beginning to appreciate the complex connection between the past and personality.

Moreover, you can see from several posts that these scholars are making connections between their personal lives and the curriculum. They use their academic identity to explore their personal identity, which is in line with the project of humanizing their education (see see entries "Summer Retreat Part I, Part II and Part III for background on how "rehumanizing our education" fits into Bayan's project). 

To collect student reflections, we used the online bulletin board application Padlet. To magnify an entry, float your cursor over the upper right-hand corner of a particular post and click on "expand post".  We welcome your comments! 

Reclaiming History: Filipino American History Month

October is Filipino American History Month, established in on 1987 by the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS). To commemorate this month, Bayan Scholars attended a film screening of Marissa Aroy’s documentary Delano Manongs that features the often hidden history of FIlipino farm workers and their contribution to the Farm Workers movement. 

Local high school counselor Reynilla Calderon-Magbuhat presented her history workshop “Know History, Know Self”. Both events were co-sponsored by Southwestern College's Filipino Student Organization Pagkakaisa, Bayan Student Organization, and Southwestern College’s Office of Student Equity Programs and Services. 

We also read several chapters from Filipino American Psychology, a text book by Professor Kevin Nadal. We paid special attention to those sections pertaining to cultural values and to how history can condition identity. 

For practically every scholar in Bayan, this month was they spent so much time in an academic setting focused on Filipino experiences. Indeed, it was most Bayan Scholars’ initial exposure to Filipino American history and culture as topic worthy scholarly attention.

This blog collects a sampling of several Bayan scholars’ reflections below, their first time considering Filipino American history. These young adults are only now being introduced to the legacy and heritage of Filipinos in American. We invite you to read these entries with that in mind. And we welcome your comment below should you wish.

To enlarge individual entries, hover your cursor over the upper right hand corner of the post. Then click on “enlarge”.

Six Weeks In: Using Writing to Reflect on our Development

Time is less and less our friend this semester! Finals are fast approaching, and we’ve yet to post a single entry. Our intention for Sariling Atin blog page was to keep our friends “in-the-loop” as to what we are learning and experiencing in our Bayan Learning Community. 

To be sure, we’ve been writing, reading, reflecting - a lot! And many of the assignments were tailored toward composing digestible bits and bites of our experiences to share with our readers. But we haven't kept up with our commitment to publicize our journey. 

This post shares Bayan Scholars thoughts and feelings about joining our learning community and their reflections about their first semester in college (all but one or two scholars are entering, first-year freshman). During the sixth week of class, we used Padlet to record our reflections. If you want to enlarge a particular scholar’s post, float your cursor toward the top right-hand corner of post and select “expand”. 

The purpose of this "Padlet project" was to engage in “metacognition”, to reflect on our thinking and our experiences. We used writing to develop introspection skills to support learning and personal development. A second aim was to make public the variety and range of experiences scholars encounter in an ethnic/culturally-focused learning community. 

We have at least eight posts in the pipeline. Stay tuned! We welcome comments!