Contextualized teaching and learning

February 10, 2018 Educator's Corner Opinion

Meet your students where they are…
One teaching strategy to let students relate lessons learned in school to daily life is contextualization through indigenization and localization. Curriculum mapping, integrative teaching as well as thematic teaching are ways to determine the entry point of integrating localization to simplify lessons to make learning worthwhile. Learning competencies could be broken into several sub-tasks integrating community activities, issues and concerns showing the competency drawn from the integration.
Contextualized Teaching and Learning (CTL) is identified as a promising strategy that actively engages students and promotes improved learning and skills development. (Gillespie) A teaching and learning procedure that helps teachers relate subject matter content to real world situations. Most students’ interest and achievement improved when they are helped to make connections between new knowledge and experiences they have had, or with other knowledge they have already mastered. Students’ engagement in their schoolwork increases significantly when they are taught why they are learning the concepts and how those concepts can be used in real-world contexts. The teacher is the facilitator and helps connect content and context.
Indigenization is difficult to deliver especially in subjects like Mathematics and Science so the best way is by simplifying the contextualized learning experiences adding real-world relevance to the topic being taught. Baguio City is a melting pot of all cultures; not all students come from a common indigenous group so indigenization could be a very difficult task to do if we are aiming to make the lessons easier for the students to understand. Using indigenous or local materials as learning materials could be an alternative resort if laboratory materials are not available. Contextualizing a lesson into multi-disciplinary subjects in culture-based teaching would be using different teaching methodologies, teaching tools, learning process assessment and enabling activities. Students often find the subject difficult to understand maybe classes were too hard to understand and they couldn’t see the relevance of why they need to learn them. We often use local terms just for some students to connect it to their locality where they encountered these situations.
Simplifying a lesson would make learning worthwhile. In subjects where problem-solving is done it is best to conceptualize it by involving authentic real-world problems or tasks. Show the learners the whole task they will do, or the whole problem they will solve as a result of completing the instruction. Teach the components of the problem or task and then help the learner use these components in solving the whole problem or doing the whole task. Involve a progression of problems not just a single application.
Contextualized teaching and learning means including the learners’ past and current experiences, as well as their future aspirations, within the contextualized learning experience designed. Instructional strategies designed to link the learning of foundational skills and content by focusing on concrete applications in a real life context. JEANNE R. DACALCAP, Pines City National High School