Social sciences as the ‘discipline for all seasons’

Teaching in a state university in La Union is both a privilege and a beautiful burden. As I always say in my everyday classroom, “being an iskolar ng bayan is a beautiful burden” because it invites us to surrender our selfless selves to a better cause: to change a corruption-torn Philippines.

When I began teaching in 2015 and the years that followed, I confronted a generally apolitical classroom composed of students who grew up in farming and fishing communities. Throughout the years, I have been a witness to a changing demographic: impatient of change, engaged in community gatherings, and vocal in political stance.

Then the pandemic happened in 2019. Disinformation machineries and political farm trolls reinvented how we receive information: twisting some basic universal truths, revising our history, and changing the way we think. As we have seen in recent history, we, Filipinos, tend to easily forget (or be blinded by) the darkest moments in our political history, even those that disintegrated our basic human rights.

That is why each time, as the popular saying goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In the last two national elections, half of the voting public became an unwilling accessory to electing two of the most consequential leaders of our time—one currently under the custody of the International Criminal Court and the other the son of a former dictator. While the millennial demographic strived to elect alternative candidates in 2015 and 2021 to replace politicians from fat dynasties, we were not stopped by the general public lured by familiar names, well-curated political campaigns, and midnight monetary “ayudas.”

This is where my frustration as an educator comes to the fore. As someone who redesigns my syllabus each year when I teach communication and media courses to integrate new lessons as part of the semestral outline, I acknowledge the urgent need to critically teach civic education to a demographic bombarded by information operated by disinformation machineries.

While some general education courses were designed to teach the young people their rights and roles in a democratic society, I acknowledge that the work is far from its fruition. That is why I also invite the Commission on Higher Education, the Department of Education, and the consortium for private institutions to teach every discipline–be it engineering, nursing, computer science, agriculture, or forestry–from an interdisciplinary perspective. This lens allows every student to learn a new skill set about computer programming, new nursing methodologies, and Singapore-inspired urban planning while assessing their impacts to environmental sustainability, social equity, and cultural heritage, among an array of development issues.

As a junior educator, I spent the good half decade discovering myself and how I relate with my students. Like other teachers conscious of their teaching philosophy, I experimented on a handful of approaches. It is through my rigorous Ph.D. scholarship in the University of the Philippines Los Baños where I found the teaching philosophy that I have long practiced in my personal and professional life: the critical pedagogy espoused by Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and other community workers and educators.

I have been teaching development communication, communication theories, and other media courses for four years now to a class of 30 to 50 future media practitioners each academic year.

Each session, I challenge them to weave the theories into the larger society we live in. I guide them to appreciate their place in the world and how the news stories they write about disasters and hazards can save lives. Each session, I challenge them to coproduce documentaries with underserved communities in La Union and Pangasinan. I guide them in authentically surfacing the voices of community actors whose lives the mainstream media do not often talk about.

As we welcome 2026, here is a daunting but a beautiful burden: if all other academic disciplines embrace the value of social sciences as an equal partner in improving the lives of everyday Filipinos who live through meager means and honest ways, we will produce a strong workforce who will reenvision a truly sustainable Philippines for all.

—————-

Ernesto Collo Jr. chairs the BA Communication Program of Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University in La Union. Beyond the academe as his full-time vocation, he is a contributor to various media outlets, speaks on media and information literacy and science communication platforms, and writes about gender-fair language, development communication, and Asian theorizing.