At Risk

                                       (photo: Unicef)

Amo baja ini ila kahimtang?. This is the thing to register in the head of a teacher as he/she sees the situation of the learner. The heart will then be gripped with compassion. The innate empathy in the educator will then be awakened as a myriad of things bombards the mind: the required readings the teacher gave, the online activities they sometimes demand, the products like collage from magazines and even the bond papers they require for the outputs to be written. These things merge with the muddy area as a porch, the dilapidated house, the near-naked kids the learners are babysitting, the sores on their skin and the putrid smell of poverty.

According to UNICEF, despite rapid economic growth and overall declining rates of poverty in recent years, the situation remains extremely challenging for children in the Philippines. In 2015, a staggering 31.4 per cent of children were living below the basic needs poverty line (down from 2012), with poverty rates actually increasing for children in ARMM: from 52.6 per cent in 2006, to 63.1 per cent in 2015.

With such data, it is not surprising that a lot of learners who have the capability to work are pushed to the work force even if child labor is not allowed by the legislation of the country. The young learners would opt to work so to survive making education as a second priority.

Adding to the difficulties is the pandemic. The COVID-19 is estimated to push an additional 88 million to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year, with the total rising to as many as 150 million by 2021, depending on the severity of the economic contraction. Extreme poverty, defined as living on less than $1.90 a day, is likely to affect between 9.1% and 9.4% of the world’s population in 2020, according to the biennial Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report.

The corona virus pandemic’s impact on the economy could lead to 1.5 million Filipinos becoming poor, according to the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) in an August 2020 study.

Although there is this cliché that poverty is not a hindrance to success, come to think of how one person can learn with an empty stomach? Aside from it, there is this looming fear that the virus can be acquired by them. Experience has taught the poor that they are the most vulnerable to calamities, illness, violence and oppression.

This is the one of the reasons why the teachers visit the learners. They need to encourage them to pursue their studies so that they will become empowered. Current research findings support the continued use of teacher home visit programs as a tool to encourage students’ academic success and parent involvement in the classroom, with many studies also noting teacher home visit programs’ improvement of students’ behavior (Lin & Bates, 2010).

With the distance learning modality, a lot has changed in the delivery of the curriculum. The educators were groping in the dark how to come up with a feasible modality where learning can take place. As part of the teachers’ job, they are expected to visit the learners who manifest difficulties based on their tracking forms. This is not a unique task of the teacher but with the health risk, it is an additional hazard to their safety. Still, they adhere to the belief that NO ONE must be left behind.

Teachers later understand that they also benefit with the activity. They commented on their teaching beliefs and practice as impacted by their home visit. Results of a study indicated that home visits enabled educators to see the families and children that they work with from a different and more positive perspective. The guided home visit questions/tools allowed them to better understand children and their families from historical and cultural perspectives. Also, teachers were better able to create a more diversified learning environment and lesson plans for their learners (Lin, Bates, 2010).

Empathy, the ability to connect others’ feeling without losing himself/herself (Chiu and Yeh, 2017), is found to play an important role in education (Ahmetoglu and Acar, 2016). Research has suggested that empathy is one of the crucial factors that influence how successful teachers are in leading their personal and professional lives (Vucinic et al., 2020). Therefore, empathy is regarded as one of the core contents of teachers’ professional development (Bullough, 2019).

The more empathetic the teacher is, the better he/she understands the situations of the learners which can lead to a more compassionate adjustment he/she will do to make learning take place. Empathy will also make the teacher’s life more meaningful. The educator will then understand his/her role in molding the community through the students and eventually makes the world a better place.

In social psychology, empathy can be categorized as an emotional or cognitive response. Emotional empathy consists of three separate components, Hodges and Myers (Encyclopedia of Social Psychology) say. “The first is feeling the same emotion as another person … The second component, personal distress, refers to one’s own feelings of distress in response to perceiving another’s plight … The third emotional component, feeling compassion for another person, is the one most frequently associated with the study of empathy in psychology,” the authors  explain.

There is a need for the educators to feel more empathy. The activity sheets which are allocated with a lot of funds are just papers. The one using them is the main concern. Without affection, all of the printing efforts and the gargantuan cost will be put into waste.