DEPED Motions Textbook Call; Brings New Challenges to Publishers
By Jessica Mariz Ignacio
The Department of Education (DepEd) will be conducting a textbook call to educational publishers by September to October 2014, the DepEd Bureau of Secondary Education OIC, Director Jocelyn Andaya said in a conference last Friday.
During her talk in the recently concluded 1st Philippine Educational Publishers Conference (PEPCon) on September 19, 2014, Director Andaya mentioned that the call aims to evaluate if the educational publishers’ textbooks fully adhere to the DepEd K-12 curriculum and if “spiraling context” is implemented. She also provided a strand-by-strand analysis of the K-12 Senior High School (SHS) Curriculum in the conference.
Publishers are expected to submit their textbooks for grades 5, 6, 11, and 12 by 2015. According to Dir. Andaya, the minimum DepEd evaluation fee is P100, 000.
A bigger challenge was brought up when Dir. Andaya said that each of the subjects in the SHS Curriculum shall be dedicated with a lone learning material.
Subjects in SHS Curriculum are classified into three types: contextualized, core curriculum, and specialized. In general, there are 7 contextualized and 17 core curriculum subjects. Specialized subjects are grouped into 4 tracks which are then subdivided into several strands—each strand having a maximum of 9 subjects.
In this case, the total number of learning materials that needs to be published for Senior High School alone will reach up to more than 300 titles.