Towards Designing an Approach in Unlearning Negative Habits Through Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao

To unlearn is to learn. Much has been said and written about how people learn, but rarely about how they unlearn. Scholars in the academe have understood that in the process of learning, it is natural for individuals to reframe, if not release, existing prior knowledge which serve as impediments or obstacles to embracing new ways of thinking. However, despite being a natural phenomenon, the idea of unlearning continues to be an under-researched subject in the Philippines, particularly in the academic community. In a highly conservative nation, how will Filipino teachers and students make meaning of the idea of unlearning? To provide enlightenment on this issue, a set of semi-structured interviews was conducted to 33 respondents (teachers and students combined) from Elizabeth Seton School, a private Catholic educational institution. Basically, the study’s intent is to explore and understand the process of unlearning, as grounded from the experiences of teachers and students of Edukasyon sa Pagpapakatao (the local and contextualized term for Values Education in the Philippines) towards the development of a new approach in teaching the aforementioned subject area. The interview transcripts were further analyzed using the techniques of qualitative research, specifically those of thematic analysis and grounded theory. The negative habits of adolescents, as well as facilitation practices of EsP teachers generated substantial themes which then served as inputs to what has been produced at the culmination of the study---E.L.S.A.’s Approach to Unlearn (Empowering the Self, Letting Go, Starting a New Life, and Action) which may be utilized as schools’ pedagogical framework in designing classroom-based strategies and methods in facilitating values formation.