ECHOES FROM THE LEARNING CAMP: STORIES OF TEACHING, STRUGGLES, AND GROWTH IN ENSCIEMA VOLUNTEERISM

Education

This qualitative research explores the experiences and challenges of teacher-volunteers engaged in teaching English, Science, and Math (EnScieMa) as an aspect of the Philippine National Learning Camp (NLC). Through a systematic thematic analysis of the interview data, we examined how volunteer teachers conceive instruction, as they cope with the limitations imposed by the system. The teachers' interviews revealed seven major themes: (1) disruption of time and continuity, (2) emotional labor and invisible burdens, (3) pedagogical improvisation in the absence of materials, (4) inadequate infrastructure and spatial isolation, (5) curricular misalignment with learners' lives, (6) effective invisibility and unilateral commitment, and (7) normative ambiguity between volunteerism and institutional reliance. Together, the themes illustrate how volunteer teachers are influenced by paradigm shifts occurring within their educational practices that operate as civic agents and structural stopgaps for gaps in education with affective effort, improvisation, and peer support. Their practices reflect an adaptive pedagogy that exists, not in racially or gendered spaces of institutionalized efficiencies, but based on moral commitments, resilience, and relational ethics. Although there are required emotional work and logistical demands as teacher-volunteers, they challenge their roles as mere implementers of curriculum to as transformational educators enacting care and justice while they maneuver within unjust conditions. Through a theoretical lens of humanizing pedagogy and infra-political resistance, the study reinvigorates the work of volunteer educators as active agents that transform the ontology of teaching or learning through the act of voluntary service. Findings suggest that the restructuring of policies should go beyond token recognition of volunteer labor as supplemental to public education, and instead, ethical recognition, adequate infrastructure, and curricular relevance are critical to service projects. The findings contribute to wider discussions focused on educational equitability, delve more in-depth into the understanding of volunteerism, and ultimately place an emphasis on the pedagogical agency of educators within under-funded learning contexts across the Global South.

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