What Kwentuhan Highlights: An Argument for the Relevance of the Classroom
Dr Maria Lovelyn C. Paclibar (Ateneo de Manila University)
Zoom Meeting
https://ucl.zoom.us/j/97365426365
Meeting ID: 973 6542 6365
This seminar is co-organized with the Philippine Society of Education and Philosophy.
What would education look like if it began from the assumption that learning is something you do together rather than something you demonstrate alone? This talk approaches that question through kwentuhan, a Filipino cultural communicative practice, and argues that it raises a serious question to philosophy of education today. Drawing on a recently published argument in Thesis Eleven, the talk introduces kwentuhan as a decolonizing practice for learning and teaching in Philippine education. It is a practice that performatively weaves kapwa relations, the reciprocal self-and-other at the core of Filipino self-understanding, and in doing so resists the colonial logic of a Philippine educational system built on Western assumptions about the individual rational learner. Despite its ubiquity in Filipino life, kwentuhan is dismissed in formal schooling as useless chatter. I have shown that this dismissal is related to how the system of education cannot accommodate the kind of knowing and learning that happens within it and through it, one that is irreducibly relational, embodied, and verified through collective recognition rather than individual demonstration. The talk develops this argument toward the question of assessment. What assumptions about knowledge, the learner, and the purpose of education are embedded in how we currently evaluate learning, and whether those assumptions are compatible with what kwentuhan highlights. It is precisely here that the entry of artificial intelligence into education becomes philosophically urgent: if learning can be adequately defined as the production of measurable individual outputs, then AI produces those outputs more efficiently than any human student can, and the classroom has no answer to its own obsolescence. Kwentuhan, understood through kapwa as an irreducibly relational and embodied practice of shared meaning-making, points toward a different definition, one in which the classroom is not a delivery mechanism for content but an irreplaceable site for a kind of learning that algorithm cannot replicate. What that means for how we assess learning is a question this talk opens rather than resolves, and one that kwentuhan has already begun to answer.
Maria Lovelyn Paclibar is an Assistant Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University. She teaches courses related to social and political philosophy and philosophy of embodiment. Her scholarly work sits at the intersection of critical social theory, decolonial and feminist philosophy, and Filipino cultural concepts. She has a particular and long-standing engagement with the work of Jürgen Habermas, especially his accounts of communicative action and solidarity, which forms the basis of her doctoral dissertation on education and political solidarity (Higher Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven). Alongside this, she has developed a growing body of work on kwentuhan, the Filipino cultural practice of communal storytelling as a decolonizing epistemological practice in Philippine education. Her most recent works are “Uncoupling Resilience from Violence: The Grit Model vs. The Social Connection Model of Resilience,” in Resilience and the Brown Babe’s Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers (ed. Tracy Llanera, Routledge, 2025) and “Kwentuhan as the Active Weaving of Kapwa Relations: Notes towards a Decolonizing Practice in Philippine Education,” in Thesis Eleven (SAGE).