The Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP) piloted the first Research Summit on May 12, 2023, at Miriam College-Henry Sy, Sr. Innovation Center, Quezon City, with a delegation from all seven regions in Luzon. It was participated in by almost a hundred CEAP member-schools, and a few non-member schools, represented by their school heads, administrators, faculty members, and researchers..
The CEAP Research Committee conceptualized the Summit to be engaging and transformative, giving birth to the theme “Engaging Catholic Schools in Transformative Education through Research and Innovation” and enumerating the objectives: 1. to articulate educational issues and concerns affecting Catholic Schools; 2. recommend evidence-based practices and solutions in addressing current educational challenges; and 3. promote best practices and innovations in teaching and learning through research.
The day-long event was started by Fr. Mauricio T. Ulep, CEAP Vice-President, when he emphasized in the Eucharistic celebration that love could be a catalyst for research topics as it may blossom into a charity-like type of studies. Parallel to this, CEAP President, Sr. Ma. Marissa R. Viri, RVM magnified the value of integrity, ethics, and dignity in subjecting the Catholic schools and institutions in research works. It was also highlighted by Mr. Jose Allan I. Arellano, CEAP Executive Director, to inculcate moral sense in every research works through its alignment with the Philippine Catholic Schools Standards.
It was essentially discussed in the plenary session the three sectors of Philippine Education framework, which are: the Basic Education with its Resource Speaker Mr. Jose Ramelle E. Javier; the Higher Education with its Resource Speaker Fr. Jannel N. Abogado, O.P.; and the Technical-Vocational Education with its Resource Speaker Fr. Onofre G. Inocencio, Jr. SDB. All these sectors contribute to transformative education and are capable of pursuing academic research that are beneficial to school actors, communities, and society.
In the afternoon, these three sectors expounded the specifics of their research agenda, whereas concurrent sessions were facilitated. The Basic Education concurrent session had the highest number of attendees with 106 school administrators, teachers, and researchers. And it was substantially discussed by Dr. Miguela B. Napiere the RVM Pedagogy of Transformative Education. She even emphasized that in doing research we may produce education giants but the formed values and character remains best.
Meanwhile, the Higher Education group had 37 participants led by Mr. Benhur A. Ong. He highlighted in his topic the essence of the social development framework directed towards the attainment of Common Good and Human Dignity. The third group is the Technical-Vocational Education with six participants headed by Dr. Regina F. Valencia as the speaker. Though this group has the smallest number of attendees, the research topic presented is entitled “PROFILE AND LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE OF TECHNICAL VOCATIONAL EDUCATION TRAINING (TVET) INSTITUTIONS IN THE BICOL REGION: THE CASE OF TOURISM AND AGRICULTURE SECTORS” which could be serve as a ground for linkage expansion both in the national and international agencies.
Lastly, the CEAP Research Committee Chairperson- Mr. Narcy F. Ador Dionisio, delivered the whole-day event synthesis. He explicitly uttered the dominance of research in transformative education. The emergence of life-long and life-wide learning in today’s education system is yet in the experimental stage, therefore research and innovation are the stronghold of this new discourse in learning and education.
Part of every program is the evaluation and assessment of its attendees. In this aspect, the CEAP Research Team could exclaim the success of the summit due to the evaluation result average of 4.60 (5 being the highest score). There are suggestions for improvement which were documented by the team and saved as a springboard for the future summits. This event served as the head start of research accompaniment to all the CEAP member-schools, thus the other Philippine islands will be visited next which are the Visayas and Mindanao.
