Filipino educators among 2010 Ramon Magsaysay awardees

A Filipino couple who left their lucrative jobs in Manila to manage an old and struggling high school in Bohol where they introduced a novel way of teaching science was among the recipients of this year’s prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Awards. Christopher and Maria Victoria Bernido, both well-respected physicists, surprised their colleagues in the National Institute of Physics at the University of the Philippines in 1999 when they moved to the poor, remote municipality of Jagna to run the Central Visayan Institute Foundation (CVIF) as school president and principal, respectively. Both Christopher and Maria Victoria were from privileged families who earned their doctorate degrees in physics from the State University of New York, according to the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation’s website. “They knew it was more practical to simply close down the school; but they also glimpsed a challenging opportunity. Running CVIF would force them to come to grips with the problems of basic education in the Philippines," the Foundation said. CVIF is a small school of only 500, mostly-poor students. The Foundation said that in 2002, the couple introduced a revolutionary way of teaching science and non-science subjects, which they called CVIF Dynamic Learning Program (DLP). A cost-effective strategy focused on strong fundamentals, the DLP limits teacher participation by devoting 70 percent of class time to student-driven activities built around clear learning targets, aided by well-designed learning plans and performance-tracking tools. The program uses locally available teaching aids and a "parallel classes scheme," in which three simultaneous classes are handled by one expert teacher with the help of facilitators. By designing DLP, the Bernidos “wanted to show that poverty need not be an excuse to compromise on teaching and learning excellence," the Foundation said. “For us, it has always been the bigger picture, the country. We both wanted to do something for the country," the Foundation quoted Maria Victoria as saying. The awards announced Monday are considered Asia's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. They are named after a former Philippine president who died in a plane crash in 1957.- KBK, GMANews.TV