DepEd hires 540 mobile teachers for Mindanao

PAGADIAN CITY, Philippines — A total of 540 mobile teachers have been hired by the Department of Education (DepEd) for the past six years in the six regions of Mindanao to deliver basic literacy education to school-age children in remote villages without public elementary schools. This was learned from Director Carolina Guerrero of the Bureau of Alternative Learning System (BALS) during a national conference of ALS regional chiefs and assistant chiefs conducted here.

Guerrero said that the DepEd, through BALS, employs mobile mentors to teach basic literacy skills to children who cannot enroll in regular elementary schools owing to the far distance of their homes.

A mobile mentor, armed with appropriate instructional modules, travels usually by foot to a distant village or sitio, gathers some 20 to 50 children and forms them into a non-graded class through the help of community leaders and parents using the local chapel, if any, or a tree-shaded area as a classroom.

The teacher, for a period of about five months, teaches the children basic literacy lessons — like reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic (or the so-called three Rs) — with some livelihood lessons integrated into the subjects.

After five months when the pupils are expected to have mastered their lessons and become functionally literate, the mobile tutor hikes to another schoolless village and repeats the procedure.

In one 10-month school year, the traveling teacher shall have served some 100 village children, Guerrero said.

The BALS director announced that during the past six years, DepEd employed 109 mobile teachers to Southern Mindanao, 107 to Central Mindanao, 96 to the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, 69 to Western Mindanao, 94 to Northern Mindanao and 67 to Caraga.

According to Guerrero, a mobile mentor, who receives a monthly salary equal to that of a regular teacher, is also provided with special traveling allowance.