Educators play a big role in shaping young minds and hearts. Now more than ever, educators from all backgrounds require support. Driven by their desire to impact lives and effect change, educators encounter a range of challenges, including burnout, insufficient resources, and communities fraught with difficulties, divisions, grief, and trauma.  

Gabay Guro: From Safe to Brave Learning Spaces is a series of two 3-hour workshop by Pilipinas Journal that aims to provide a safe holding space for community teachers to (i) reflect on their teaching journey, and (ii) hone their capacities and creativities in delivering rights-based, culturally relevant and resilience-focused education to their learners. 

During the workshop, the team ran a retrospective and check in with the community teachers on their teaching journey in school year 2022-2023 where they shared their sources of joys and struggles from the past months. Afterwards, the team deep dived into an introduction to Socio-Emotional Learning (SEL) to help support and improve the teachers’ capacity and creativity to teach a rights-based, culturally relevant, and resilience-focused education to their students, while allowing them to hold a safe space for themselves and their communities. 

"The activities on this workshop are very helpful to us teachers, for us to know our weaknesses and strenghths that are very important in our teaching. I hope for more events like this. I super enjoyed this kind of activity.” - Parañaque Supervised Neighborhood Play (SNP) teacher 

Gabay Guro became part of Cartwheel Foundation’s Daloy ng Karunungan, a series of learning sessions for its community teachers. 40 participants came from the Sama-Bajau teachers from the Sama-Bajau Activity Center in Parañaque City, Parañaque Supervised Neighborhood Play (SNP) teachers as well as teachers from Davao Del Norte, Zamboanga and Bukidnon. 

 

Read an article covering the initiative here.