COTABATO CITY—The country’s students will soon have a deeper understanding of the Bangsamoro struggle to attain genuine peace and order in Mindanao with the scheduled integration next school year of its history in the Department of Education’s K-12 curriculum, a peace process officer said here recently.
The K-12 curriculum, introduced nationwide by the DepEd in school year 2011-2012, consists of kindergarten, a six-year elementary education, a four-year junior high school (Grades 7, 8, 9 and 10) and a two-year senior high school (Grades 11 and 12) curriculum. Grade 11 was initially enforced last month.
A report to Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao Gov. Mujiv Hataman from the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP) said incorporating the history of Bangsamoro in the K-12 curriculum “is part of the government’s continued initiatives for Truth, Justice and Reconciliation (TJR) which is a major dimension of the Bangsamoro peace process.”
The OPAPP had worked with the DepEd even before the TJR Commission report came out, adding that “the template for the pilot integration into the K-12 curriculum would be finished before the start of next school year.”
It previously conducted a seminar-workshop at the Cotabato City-based Notre Dame University for the government bureaucracy on the Bangsamoro narrative which later was piloted in several areas of Southern Philippines.
Other OPAPP initiatives designed “to help heal the wounds inflicted by the decades-long Mindanao conflict were also undertaken.”