1st Bangsamoro Peace Education Conference

 

Last May, in order to implement HWPL Peace Education throughout the Philippines, the HWPL Philippine branch announced peace education textbooks for the provinces of Southern Leyte and Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, including Laguna Province. This aims to establish a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with the Philippine Department of Education and implement peace education on a national level.

 

 

Earlier, the Department of Education in Southern Leyte compiled localized HWPL peace education textbooks and conducted pilot classes for this purpose. This initiative was inspired by the localized peace textbooks for Bangsamoro, which were announced at the Bangsamoro Peace Education Conference held last January.

On January 29 of this year, the “1st Bangsamoro Peace Education Conference” was held at the Shariff Kabunsuan Cultural Complex in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Muslim Region in Mindanao, Philippines, co-hosted by the Department of Education in Cotabato City and HWPL. During the conference, localized HWPL peace education textbooks, incorporating Islamic values, were introduced. The presentation demonstrated the potential for integrating HWPL peace education into moral and social subjects and showcased effective methods for implementing textbooks across all grades, from Grade 1 in elementary school to Grade 12 in high school, through demo classes.

 

 

The Peace Education Conference was attended by a total of 668 participants, including five high-ranking government officials such as the Minister of Basic, Higher, and Technical Education of Bangsamoro, 50 principals of elementary, middle, and high schools under the Department of Education in Cotabato City, and approximately 613 faculty members.

In January 2020, HWPL Philippines signed a MOA with the Schools Division Office of Cotabato City and conducted the “HWPL Peace Education Contextualization Workshop in Mindanao.” However, the initiative was interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The peace education initiative resumed when officials from Cotabato City participated in HWPL’s 9th Anniversary of the World Peace Summit on September 18, 2023.

 

 

Upon resuming the project, the Schools Division Office of Cotabato City, with active support from the local government in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region and the Office of the Presidential Adviser on Peace, Reconciliation, and Unity, began compiling the HWPL Peace Education textbook, which includes 12 lessons for students from 1st grade of elementary school to 3rd year of high school. Fifty-two teachers participated in the textbook compilation and conducted three contextualization workshops. The completed textbook resulted in 211 instructional materials, which were presented at the conference.

In the future, the Ministry of Basic, Higher, and Technical Education (MBHTE) will validate the textbook and, upon completion, distribute it to approximately 4,000 schools, providing peace education to around 1.26 million students in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region.