Southeastern Philippines Journal of Research and Development

Adapting Early Childhood Curriculum to Technology: Insights from South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Herlina — 2025-09-30

Digital technologies have emerged as a revolutionary influence in early childhood education, altering how young learners interact with their surroundings. This transition in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, necessitates curricular modifications that align with children’s developmental requirements. Nonetheless, scant empirical research has investigated how adaptive curriculum design meets these requirements in technology-driven environments. This research investigated adaptable curriculum development for early childhood education within technology-integrated environments in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. A mixed-methods approach was employed to gather data from 175 participants, comprising teachers, school leaders, supervisors, and education officials. Furthermore, a structured questionnaire was quantitatively analyzed using Partial Least Squares–Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) with SmartPLS 4. The findings indicated substantial correlations between professional development and digital confidence (β = 0.421, p < 0.001), as well as between digital confidence and curricular adaptation (β = 0.356, p = 0.003). The model exhibited robust reliability and convergent validity (AVE > 0.50; CR > 0.70). The findings suggest that robust professional training enhances educators’ digital preparedness and positively affects their curriculum development in early learning environments. Thematic analysis utilizing NVivo revealed persistent problems, including infrastructural deficiencies, absence of peer mentoring, and discrepancies in local curricular norms. The synthesis of findings indicates that adaptable curriculum design necessitates policy alignment, equal access to digital resources, and teacher autonomy in contextualizing content. This study provides actionable insights for creating an adaptable, technology-responsive curriculum and advocates for ongoing professional development and infrastructure investment. Stakeholders are advised to enhance early childhood education in technologically advancing contexts.

AI-powered Personalization for Learning and Human-Robot Interaction: A Case Study with Pre-Service Teachers from Indonesia

Ahmad Al Yakin — 2025-09-30

The rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence in education (AIEd) presents unprecedented opportunities to improve learner engagement through personalized instruction and human-robot social interaction (HRSI). However, AI implementation in preservice teacher education in Indonesia remains limited and underexplored. This study investigates the impact of AI-powered personalization on learning outcomes and social interactions among Indonesian preservice teachers. Employing a mixed-method design, the study involved 20 participants using the virtual AI tutor "Cicibot" to support personalized and collaborative learning. Quantitative data were collected via structured questionnaires and analyzed using Pearson correlation, while qualitative insights were obtained from semi-structured interviews. Findings reveal a significant and positive correlation between AI-driven personalization, learner engagement, and social interaction, highlighting the effectiveness of AI tools in fostering meaningful collaboration. This study provides practical implications for AI integration in educational settings, offering insights for future policy and curriculum development in technologically emergent regions.

Child-friendly Learning Spaces in the Alternative Learning System (ALS): Focus on Northern Mindanao, Philippines

Ray Butch Mahinay — 2025-09-30

Community Learning Centers (CLCs) under the Alternative Learning System (ALS) serve as critical spaces for inclusive, second-chance education for out-of-school youth and adults (OSYAs) in the Philippines. These centers provide flexible, community-based venues that operationalize ALS goals, particularly in geographically isolated and underserved regions like Northern Mindanao. This study examines how ALS CLCs in the region align with UNICEF’s Child-Friendly School (CFS) framework, which sets holistic standards for inclusive, learner-centered, and protective learning environments. Employing a descriptive-evaluative mixed-methods design, the study was anchored on seven dimensions: (1) learner participation, (2) health and well-being, (3) safety, (4) enrollment, (5) academic achievement, (6) teacher morale, and (7) community support. Data were collected through surveys of 342 ALS implementers across all 14 Schools Division Offices and supplemented by focus group discussions for triangulation. Findings revealed strong alignment in learner engagement, academic achievement, and teacher motivation, while gaps persisted in infrastructure, health services, and community-based CLC resourcing. Furthermore, correlation analysis further indicated that CLC typology and ownership were significantly associated with child-friendliness outcomes. The results emphasize the role of physical and institutional structures in shaping equitable learning opportunities for OSYAs. This pioneering study represents the first integration of the CFS framework into ALS research in the Philippines, contributing regional evidence on sustainable, rights-based education systems and offering a contextual model for adapting child-friendly principles to second-chance learning in Southeast Asia.

Buried Memories, Imagined Wealth: Yamashita Treasure as Collective Memory in Everyday Life in Mindanao

Fumiko Morota — 2025-09-30

This paper examines how Yamashita Treasure—an allegedly buried wartime hoard left by the Japanese military in the Philippines—continues to be remembered, narrated, and imagined in the everyday lives of residents in Mindanao. Based on an ethnographic methodology involving long participant observation in four field sites between 2015 and 2024, and coding of the obtained data, the study explores how ordinary people encounter and interpret traces believed to indicate the presence of the treasure—such as fragments of pottery, symbolic carvings on rocks, or cryptic maps—as well as unexpected events like sudden economic success or the rare arrival of Japanese visitors. These materials and incidents are rarely verified through historical inquiry but are instead animated by collective imagination, subaltern knowledge production, and deeply embedded wartime memories. Engaging with postcolonial theory, the paper argues that narratives surrounding the treasure do not merely reflect rumor or folklore. Rather, they serve as a grassroots form of war memory, indirectly recalling Japan’s occupation of the Philippines. While the treasure’s existence remains uncertain, its imagined presence generates a sense of possibility—a hope for future prosperity grounded in a painful past. As such, the narration of the Yamashita Treasure becomes a means of simultaneously resisting historical forgetting and producing future-oriented imaginaries. By analyzing these everyday practices and representations, this study contributes to broader discussions on postcolonial memory, hope, and the lingering effects of war.

Hula-Bangsa-Agama as Padduman: Reclaiming the Tausug Doctrine of Statehood and Islamic Political Identity

Hannbal Bara — 2025-09-30

Hula-Bangsa-Agama is a triadic indigenous principle of the Tausug that links hula (land), bangsa (nation), and agama (religion) into a holistic concept of statehood. Historically, it has served as a padduman, a guiding political doctrine, shaping governance, identity, and resistance. This study examined its origins and continuing relevance using historical-documentary research supported by content and thematic analysis of Qur’anic texts, classical Islamic treatises, Sultanate of Sulu records, and ethnonationalist discourses. The findings reveal that Hula-Bangsa-Agama integrated land, people, and faith into a coherent political vision while addressing challenges such as institutional decline, historical amnesia, and misinterpretations of jihad. As a political-theological framework, it provides indigenous legitimacy and a moral vision of governance rooted in unity, sacred responsibility, and cultural dignity. By challenging prevailing misrepresentations, the study argues that this principle offers a strong decolonial framework for reclaiming Tausug political agency and rethinking indigenous governance within contemporary contexts.

Expressions of Reassurance in the Quran: A Speech Act Analysis

Hekmat Abed Daifallah Khazaleh — 2025-09-30

The Qur’an functions as a profound source of reassurance, offering guidance that addresses both the hearts and minds of its readers. Through its eloquent and impactful discourse, it instils a sense of confidence and tranquility, providing direction for navigating life’s challenges. The speech act of reassurance within the Qur’an thus serves as a significant reminder of faith, resilience, and the enduring presence of divine support. The current study investigates how reassurance functions as a commissive speech act in the Quran, employing Searle’s Speech Act Theory (1969) as the analytical framework. While previous studies have explored directive speech acts in religious discourse, there remains a gap in understanding how reassurance is linguistically and pragmatically realized in the Quranic text. Focusing on seven selected verses, the study analyzes the types of speakers (Allah, angels, prophets, and believers), syntactic structures (declaratives, imperatives, and negative imperatives), and illocutionary forces involved in conveying reassurance to human recipients in moments of distress. Through qualitative, contextual, and linguistic analysis, the study identifies patterns in the deployment of reassurance and examines their alignment with Searle’s felicity conditions. Findings reveal that although reassurance is categorically commissive, it is expressed both directly through declarative statements and indirectly via imperative forms. The speaker-hearer relationship, situational context, and lexical choices are illustrated to play crucial roles in shaping the illocutionary force of reassurance. The study highlights the Quran’s sophisticated use of speech acts to provide divine and prophetic support, offering insights into the pragmatic dimensions of religious discourse.

The Language of Praise and Worship: A Corpus Analysis of Register Variation in Christian Songs

Raymund Palayon — 2025-09-30

Songs play a central role in Christianity, not only as musical expressions of faith but also as powerful tools for influencing beliefs and behavior. Some churches utilize hymns, while others prefer contemporary Christian songs. Despite their significance in shaping religious views and practices, the language of Christian songs remains underexamined in linguistic research. Previous studies have analyzed only a small number of texts and focused on limited linguistic features, providing a limited understanding of their stylistic functions. This paper examined the key linguistic features in the two sets of Christian songs—church hymns and contemporary Christian songs—to illustrate their register variation, using multidimensional analysis, key semantic tag analysis, and key part-of-speech analysis. From the analyses, the church hymns display features associated with scriptural texts (e.g., God, salvation, Jesus), adoration (e.g., glory, bless, rejoice), and appreciation (e.g., gracious, thankful, grateful), illustrating the informational and context-independent characteristics in these songs. The contemporary Christian songs display features associated with life-related situations (e.g., breakdown, failure, loss), spiritual relationships (e.g., me, you), and an engaging style of communication (e.g., I, we, your), illustrating the context-dependent and persuasive characteristics in these songs. This study provides a framework for characterizing the linguistic features of worship songs from non-Christian contexts, enabling future research to compare religious music across different traditions.

Language Encounters in Public Parks: Mapping the Linguistic Landscape of Davao City, Philippines

Prizza Mia Pil — 2025-09-30

As the most visible expression of language in everyday life, the linguistic landscape (LL) captures the interplay of a community’s linguistic diversity, sociocultural dynamics, and underlying language policies. While there is growing interest in these dynamics in both global and national contexts, LL often goes unnoticed and underexamined in local contexts, such as public parks in Davao City, Philippines. Thus, this study explores the linguistic landscape of Davao City public parks, which plays a crucial role in shaping identity and social interaction in the city. The researchers examined the types of signs, the languages or codes present in the signs, and their functions within the nine parks across downtown Davao City. Employing qualitative content analysis, the findings reveal that top-down signs were structured and standardized, while bottom-up signs were informal and diverse. Regarding the codes, the signs were displayed in English, Cebuano, Filipino, Spanish, and Japanese, and were either monolingual, bilingual, or trilingual, serving both informational and symbolic functions. The interaction between the informational and symbolic functions of signs illustrates how language operates as both a tool for regulation and a marker of identity in public recreational spaces. The study highlights how signs serve both regulatory and identity functions in public spaces, thereby recommending the inclusivity of signage policies that enhance cultural representation, particularly of indigenous languages. This research contributes to the understanding of the role of multilingualism in public spaces, identity, and accessibility.

An Archival Study on the Linguistic State of Obo Manobo and Kinamiging Manobo

Mae-Ann Gasing — 2025-09-30

The Manobo language is one of the 175 Indigenous languages in the Philippines. It belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian, Austronesian linguistic family, primarily spoken by the Manobo or Manuvu Indigenous cultural community. Currently, 15 Manobo languages are spoken in Mindanao; two are under the threatened language vitality. This archival research investigates the current status of two threatened Manobo languages, the Obo Manobo and Kinamiging Manobo, particularly on their lexicography, phonology, morphology, and syntax, and literacy materials, utilizing literature and documents available in online data repositories. The results of the study show that there is substantial information about Obo Manobo linguistics. However, Kinamiging Manobo requires extensive research because of the scarcity of lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic documentation, as well as the unavailability of literacy materials. This exacerbates the danger of this threatened language once left undocumented. Hence, this study initiates an urgent call for more up-to-date investigations on Obo Manobo linguistics and studies of the lexical items, phonological, and morphological aspects in Kinamiging Manobo for future studies. Moreover, the Kinamiging Manobo linguistic investigation must be prioritized to contribute to the ongoing discourse of indigenous language preservation.

Antimicrobial Activity of Uvaria rufa (Annonaceae) Leaf Extracts

Lawrence Delgado — 2025-09-30

Antimicrobial resistance is considered a threat to global health. Given the use and benefits of herbal medicine, the healthcare community has been investigating plant-derived compounds for their potential antimicrobial activity. Susong kalabaw (Uvaria rufa) was studied for its antibacterial activity using fractionated leaf extracts. U. rufa leaves were extracted using 70% ethanol and fractionated using five solvents, including water, methanol/water, sec-butanol, DCM, and hexane. Phytochemical screening was performed on crude extracts. Moreover, the inhibitory activity of crude and fractionated leaf extracts of U. rufa was evaluated using the Kirby-Bauer test and MIC assay. Phytochemical screening confirmed the presence of alkaloids, flavonoids, saponins, tannins, and terpenoids in crude extracts. The Kirby-Bauer test showed that crude extracts inhibited the growth of Escherichia coli (8.3 mm), Bacillus subtilis (10.0 mm), and Staphylococcus aureus (14.5 mm). The fractions, including water (10.3 mm), methanol/water (11.2 mm), and sec-butanol (17.8 mm), also revealed inhibitory activity against S. aureus. Moreover, Pseudomonas aeruginosa was susceptible to the sec-butanol fraction, showing an average zone of inhibition of 9.3 mm. For the MIC assay, the methanol/water fraction inhibited the growth of S. aureus at a substantially lower concentration of 67.35 μg/mL. On the other hand, B. subtilis and S. aureus were susceptible to water and sec-butanol fractions, showing lower concentrations of 68.1 μg/mL and 26.21 μg/mL, respectively. These results emphasized that crude and fractionated leaf extracts of U. rufa demonstrated promising antibacterial activity against bacterial samples in the Kirby-Bauer test and MIC assay.

The Thriving of Indigenous Knowledge Systems: A Review of Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Practices on Disaster Risk Reduction and Management of Selected IP Groups in the Davao Region

Aurelio Agcaoili — 2025-09-30

[No abstract]

Kapandayan: Paradox of Indigenous People Wisdom

Nikodemus Niko — 2025-09-30

[No abstract]

Tearing through Walls the Songs: The Three Mangansakan Anthologies of Recent Moro Literatures

Ricardo de Ungria — 2025-09-30

[No abstract]

Editorial Preface

Sajed Ingilan — 2025-09-30