Beyond desire : deconstructing teacher discourse in the Philippines under the American regime, 1907-1911
Abstract
[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] This study examines the discourse of Filipino teachers under the American Colonial Period in the Philippines. The study focuses on a teacher-created journal, The Filipino Teacher, examining the evolution and implications of teacher discourse in regards to the imposition of an American pedagogy, educational organization, and government policy. Colonial studies are rarely examined from the point-of-view of the colonial subject. Typical studies have a propensity to focus its efforts on the colonizer's policies, perspectives, and methods of navigating the colonial state. Access to primary materials written from the perspective of the colonized subject reveals how Filipino teachers navigated their experiences under the colonial administration of the United States. Modern studies suggest that colonial education has undermined the economic and social development of the modern Filipino state. Through the method of Historical Critical Discourse Analysis, the results of the study explore the degree to which Filipino teachers' willingly adhered to the American-based policies in education. This study further reveals that Filipino teachers delicately negotiated between the way to adopt the positive elements of the education policy, such as class administration and teacher professionalization, while teaching students (and colleagues) how to retain patriotism and the sense of being a Filipino. Although these attempts were made, later studies reveal that the entrenchment of colonial practice outweighed the internal attempts to retain cultural independence. This study suggests that colonialism, while greatly disempowering, was an imperfect system that allowed for the seepage of alternate cultural experiences that could run parallel to dominant colonial features.
Degree
Ph. D.
Thesis Department
Rights
Access is limited to the campus of the University of Missouri--Columbia.