ABSTRACT
The importance and benefits of mining are not as clearly as perceived by the public as that of its negative impacts. The long list, that usually starts from the harm it causes the environment always overshadows its significance in people’s lives. Efforts to address this through stakeholder engagements of various forms are in place, making the information, education and communication (IEC) materials as the basic lens through which a person perceives mining and geosciences. Being the most important stakeholders in environmental cases and concerns, following the doctrine of intergenerational responsibility and seeing the same as crucial to sustainable development, it is imperative to reach out and educate the primary and secondary school children.
As school textbooks play a vital role in the primary and secondary education through which ideological orientations in mining and geosciences are strongly built, actual textbooks used for teaching at this early level, as prescribed by the Department of Education (DepEd) were analyzed using the document analysis method combined with answers from interviews and survey questionnaires distributed to both teachers and students of primary and secondary schools. Although the data analysis found no adverse information on mining per se, the over-all presentation and the textual contents relevant to mining do not reflect in the viewpoints of the students at the primary and secondary level.
With a very little to no studies conducted and the lack of policies issued by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau to strengthen the textual contents relevant to mining in basic education textbooks, this paper addresses these gaps through a proposal as herewith provided, for an issuance of Joint Memorandum Circular between the Department of Environment and Natural Resources through the Mines and Geosciences Bureau and the Department of Education, for textbook development, specifically, to review, improve, and appropriately revise the information on mining and geosciences as published in primary and secondary school textbooks, these, being the first and compulsory source of knowledge for basic education in the Philippines.
Keywords: Managing Ideologies, Mining, School Textbooks, Stakeholder Engagement