Career Trajectory

To be honest, I did not have any particular trajectory before joining EDEF. I was involved in community education while most of my mentors have been part of the Academy. For academic mentor nudged me towards the university while my public intellectual community steered me into doing grassroots education. I ended up doing both. I always taught in the university/college while doing full-time jobs in the community. I could not let go doing popular education projects among oppressed communities.

Early on I directed programs at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Leeward Community College. Later, I ran a mental-health and well-being for young men and boys at Kokua Kalihi Valley Family Comprehensive Services using building bikes as a metaphor for healthy communities.

As I moved to cities like Seattle and Oakland, I engaged in creating programming for men of color trying to decolonize masculinity, as well as healing spaces for burnt out activist–providing regenerative spaces of power.

I was involved in creating educational spaces for immigrant and undocumented spaces in the Bay Area. Fighting for immigration reform through faith based communities.

I also engaged in fighting for indigenous languages to be taught in schools as well as teaching Ilokano language in San Francisco (the first ever Ilokano class in the Bay Area).

All the while teaching classes in Language and Literature, Humanities, Education and Ethnic Studies.

The skill sets I learned in the EDEF program was broad enough to be engaged in the intersections of various struggles and movements and specialized enough that I could deepen my love for Popular Education and Critical Pedagogy. Though we studied education generally, I was able to insert myself in dialogues concerning health, housing, immigration, indigenous struggle and third world organizing. Ultimately, EDEF’s classes and faculty provided me a progressive space to develop my pedagogical practice as a site of post-decolonization.

Location

• Original: the Northern Philippines, grew up in Kalihiliolaumiha, Honolulu
• Current: Honolulu, HI

Program & Year

PhD in Education: Educational Foundations, 2014