Brigada Pagbasa Programme ( National Reading Brigade)

Objective:

Consistent with the mandate of the Department of Education in the Philippines, through External Partnerships Service and under its Brigada Eskwela Programme (National School Maintenance Week Programme), to bring together all education and literacy champions and supporters to take an active role to teach Filipino children how to read and become educated for life.

Background

The Department of Education (DepEd) signed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) with World Vision Development Foundation (WVDF) as its programme co-lead convener to establish Brigada Pagbasa as an offshoot of Brigada Eskwela through its External Partnerships Service.

Brigada Pagbasa Programme is a:

• national movement for reading that aims to bring together all education champions and supporters to contribute to nation-building by helping all Filipino children enhance their reading skills in the context of partnership. This is to support DepEd's goal to uplift literacy among Filipino Learners
• readership initiative that aims to support existing enrichment and remediation activities led by DepEd. It also serves as social accountability platform that encourages community participation and accountability by ensuring that every member of the community is aware of their role in our children’s education.

The tagline, Sama-sama, tulong-tulong sa pagtataguyod ng kultura sa pagbasa (Working together in promoting culture of reading) was coined to highlight the importance of promoting reading culture in the community and foster a genuine love for reading to help our children become functionally literate.

In June 2021, the Department of Education's Office of External Partnerships Service released the Guidelines on the Use of PSF for Building Collaboration and Linkages (BPLP) for SY21 to help improve literacy support for our students and solve literacy gaps in partnership.

Brigada Pagbasa Follows the LEAD A Child Framework which is an acrostic of the key principles we adapted in the programme implementation.

• L – is for leveraging partners' after–school initiatives which means, we need not reinvent the wheel and duplicate what DepEd and partners are already doing in the community but rather identify the gaps and provide support to strengthen the impact of DepEd existing programmes.
• E – is for Engaging volunteers to facilitate reading sessions in the community. The way Brigada Eskwela is implemented, community professionals, LGU Officials, Parent leaders, youth leaders, and church partners volunteer as learning facilitators to share their time, talents and treasures to help reach the most vulnerable learners.
• A – is on the adaptation of indicators or schools, where we provide partners an opportunity to choose the activities and schools they wish to support based on their expertise, available resources, and organizational mandate.
• D - is for Drive. To ensure that the literacy-building support we provided is responsive to the needs of our learners, we work collaboratively with education experts to Drive education solutions and innovations to make learning more meaningful for our children.

Programme Implementation Strategy

In our pursuit to help ensure that our children will become educated for life, Brigada Pagbasa Programme aims to support DepEd to:

• help children have increased learning outcomes by providing children access to literacy enhancement programmes using multi-modal learning approaches.
• achieve the programme goal, we have identified  through 2 key initiatives:
  • first is to equip parents and community partners to support their children's learning. In collaboration with the Department of Education’s Curriculum and Partnership Team together with the experts from NGO partners and Community Professionals, we design a contextualized teacher training programme for the community volunteers and learning facilitators aligned with the target competencies and needs of the learners.  
  • after the training, our trained facilitators will be mobilised to facilitate reading interventions using the modality appropriate for the learners.

The Programme Cycle

The planning in preparation for the conduct of reading interventions in the community is led by the school heads with the support of education stakeholders. During planning, key details which include mapping of learners, volunteer orientation, and development of locally – relevant materials are being discussed to ensure that the programme will be implemented successfully.

To ensure the intentionality of the programme, we begin by assessing children’s literacy skills and reading readiness using World Vision’s Functional Literacy Tool or FLAT to identify the specific enrichment activities that will be provided for our children. Partners are also using other assessment tools prescribed by the Department of Education. Before the conduct of the literacy enrichment activity, pretest and post-test are conducted to determine learners’ progress as they go about the reading programme.

In the course of programme implementation, we conduct regular feedback sessions and monitoring activities with our partners and reading facilitators to identify implementation gaps and action steps to address the challenges. The number of sessions we implement varies from context to context. Most communities implement the programme the whole year-round to ensure that learners are ready to transition to the next grade level while others run it for a minimum of 15 sessions, depending on the learners' needs. The modality also depends on the community protocol being implemented in the community and learners' access to the learning modality.

The Training Menu

World Vision Education Technical Programme Team in collaboration with the Department of Education’s Curriculum and Instruction team at different levels designed a teachers’ training programme to be given to our community partners and learning facilitators. The following are the competencies included in the training programme.

1. Teaching beginning reading in the mother tongue.
2. Balance Literacy Approach
3. Developing locally – relevant materials using Bloom Software.
4. Assessing learners’ functional literacy skills using FLAT.
5. Oral language development at home

The topics are being selected based on the needs of the learners and target competencies to help address literacy challenges faced by our students.

Volunteer Engagement

Our partners support the programme based on the competencies and available resources. Some partners composed of community professionals, teacher applicants, education graduates Local Government Unit Officials, and Parent Teachers Association Officers sign up as volunteer tutors, while others are donating books for the community–based reading sessions. Others provide mobilisation support for our volunteers such as transportation, communication allowances, and facilitators' kits for our volunteers. We also partner with Academic institutions, where we mobilise National Service Training Programme students to provide tutorial activities using multi-modal learning approaches. 

Brigada Pagasa Learning Resources

To check on how our partners are implementing the initiative, you can follow us on

• Facebook at @SamasaBrigadaPagbasa.

We also encourage our partners to share the link to their posts on our Facebook page so that our partners can learn about good practices they can adopt.

Implementation Pictures

This image shows a mobile library that was used to bring books to the children. The LGU lent the tricycle, while the PTA and NGO partners donated the storybooks. The mobile library visits the neighbourhood and is stationed in each area for the entire day to allow our students to read because children are not permitted to leave their homes due to health protocols, DepEd teachers and Brigada Pagbasa learning facilitators assist parents and caregivers in selecting grade-level appropriate storybooks for their children. As indicated in the slides, other student leaders are also assisting in the facilitation of reading sessions for their siblings inside their homes while others are reading on their own.

Use of Gadget

Other partners are also using instructional tablets donated by the LGU in the conduct of the reading enrichment session for the children. The devices are lent to the student during the session and will be collected after to allow other learners to use the tablet and access offline digital materials installed on the device.

World Vision would like to encourage everyone to support the programme and do their part in educating our children. To sustain the gains and bridge the gap as we embark on the second year of emergency remote learning every member of the community must be equipped to perform their role in effectively educating the children. Indeed, amazing things happen when we work together.

For further information email: geomel_jetonzo@wvi.org, Technical Programme Manager for Education and Life Skills at World Vision Philippines