Cultural Disconnect
One day, circa 2009, I was driving around with my nieces. They’re 1st generation Filipinos Americans, like myself, meaning my parents were born in the Philippines, but I was born in the United States. For a reason I can’t remember, I asked them what the capital of the Philippines was and they couldn’t name it (It’s manila by the way). In retrospect, they couldn’t have been older than middle schoolers at the time, but I still, I think I learned that trivia at a very young age. Anyways, I was taken back a little a realized that our family’s connection to traditional Philippine culture is slowly dissipating. I currently can’t speak Tagalog (My family’s Filipino dialect) fluently myself, but more on that in some other blog entry on introspective cultural awareness later…
When we got back to their house that day I wanted to teach them how to learn to count from 1 to 10 in Tagalog. This was long before I studied the art of instructional design or even knew what it meant for that matter. I thought about how my nieces were singing on the ride home and how they could recite nearly any song playing from the radio verbatim. They didn’t miss a beat. So we grabbed my ukelele and made a song.
Proof of Concept
The following video is a draft of the an episode I created my freshman year (2009):
Below is a storyboard I created for the stop motion portion for the story of Malakas at Maganda.
Here is a stand alone version of the counting song which I later recreated (3D video featured near the top of the entry):
Filipino Youth Group
This is an audio recording by Carmiliza Riculan used during a live performance by the youth organization FACS, Filipino American Culture Society:
Carmiliza and I first learned about this story while in FACS and under Raymond Obispo’s mentorship. More on that experience later. Here is a FACS performance of the piece at the 2007 Asian Pacific American Heritage High School showcase.
This piece is performed periodically. This is a version performed by the 2016 cohort.