Engendering Agency, Mindfulness, and Critical Thinking in Online Education

Abstract

Challenges remain in the conduct of graduate education even when Philippine society has already begun its so-called post pandemic recovery. Such challenges include but are not limited to shifting work arrangements, perturbations in personal and family priorities, and everyday socio-economic realities such as the traffic problem and the rising cost of living. Given this backdrop of hard realities and increasing pressure on the individual’s mental space, in which learners attempt to negotiate the pursuit of graduate studies, I draw on my lived experience in teaching graduate students at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman and problematize the issues in engendering agency, mindfulness, and critical thinking as desired states of being in an empowered, student-centered learning setting. Utilizing phenomenography, the study probes the approaches that were effective in teaching and learning as well as their challenges and the attendant contexts. I hope to contribute to the academic discourse on rethinking graduate education pedagogy.