Discipline and Ideas in the Applied Social Sciences

Lesson 3 FUNCTIONS OF APPLIED SOCIAL

Quarter 4-Week 3-4 SCIENCES 2

I. Introduction
We have previously learned about the disciplines in applied social sciences through
explanations about the core values of applied social sciences—respect for the inherent dignity
and worth of persons, pursuit of social justice, integrity of professional practice, confidentiality in
professional practice and competence in professional practice. Applied social sciences cover a
broad field, drawing on different social theories and perspectives and combines theory and
practice to deal with the complexity of social issues that cover human pain, stress, threat to
dignity and threat to human rights experienced by individuals, groups, and communities.
In the previous chapters, you have defined clearly what applied social science is, its basic
concepts in the context of the different fields and disciplines.
In this chapter, you will learn about the different functions of applied social sciences in
the context of each field or area of study, topic and/or a particular issue but this time in the
Philippine setting. In each function area, explanations and examples are discussed to give a
better understanding of how these functions are evident in our society as Filipinos.

At the end of the lesson, the learners are expected to identify situations that would require
or necessitate the performance of the various functions in local/Philippine settings.

Discussion
Functions of Applied Social Sciences

1. Self-development
Self-development has to do with taking an active role in one’s own development.

Self-development in the Philippine setting

The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) envisions a society where the poor and
vulnerable individuals, groups and communities are empowered for an improved quality of life. One of the major
goals of DSWD is self-development as well as empowerment.
The department in its programs has provisions of therapeutic and productive activities for self- development
and self-reliance. Projects include gardening, animal raising, horticulture, handicraft, and others Special Education
Services: Training along self- care and grooming social skills Functional 3R Development of positive attitude and
self- confidence.
DSWD upholds the right to participation and self-development of the youth. The Government Internship
Program (GIP) is a component of the Kabataan 2000 program of the government, which was developed to allow
in-school and out-of-school youth to experience working in various government agencies. The program aims to
provide experience that would help if they wished to eventually join the public service workforce.
The GIP prioritizes youth beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), the youth
included in the DSWD's Listahanan, which is a record of who and where the most poor and vulnerable families
are in the country.

What is Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and why does it exist?

Republic Act No. 10912, otherwise known as the ―Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Act of
2016‖, is an act which requires CPD as the mandatory requirement for the renewal of Professional Identification
Card.
Continuing Professional Development exists to ensure that an individual enhances their skills and abilities
once they have formally qualified. Typically, academic qualifications have already been completed at this stage
and an individual is now working within their specific industry and job function. CPD is important as it helps to
ensure that further learning is progressed in a structured, practical and relevant way to guarantee that there are
applied efficiencies in learning. CPD allows an individual to focus on what specific skills and knowledge they
require over a short-term period, say 12 months, in order to be confident there is recognizable improvement within
their proficiency and skill sets.

2. Art and Entertainment

In moments of hardship, the arts provide collective resilience among people. The American people in the
1930s and 1940s, for example, enjoyed many forms of entertainment and most, inexpensively. Movies and sounds
increased in variety and in their popularity—comedies, gangsters, movies, and musicals. During this period, some
of the great dramas of American film reached theaters. Radio was also wildly popular, offering many kinds of
programs, from sermons to soap operas.

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The Filipino Art

Filipinos are highly relational people. They are hardly alone, quite happy being together – when they eat,
sleep, work, travel, pray, create or celebrate. Having a minimal sense of privacy, they are open, trusting and easily
accessible socially. Instead of a meticulous concern for safeguarding their private sphere, as in the case of
Western peoples, many Filipinos actively seek a convergence of their lives with the lives of others.
The communal orientation is manifested in all aspects of traditional Filipino village life and, to a great extent,
even in urban settings.
The traditional arts most sensitively reflect this communal orientation. Being the most lucid and expressive
symbols of a culture’s values, the arts are the most powerful instruments of inquiry into the essential character of
a culture. It is undeniable that the following basic concepts and attributes of art and the contexts of artistic creation,
expression and experience could only have arisen in communal or integral Filipino cultural settings:
1. Integration of the arts with other values and functions – The aesthetic is not divorced from utilitarian,
religious, moral, spiritual, social, and ecological concerns. This ensures a balanced cultivation and
development of human faculties – physical skills as well as inner potentials.
2. Unity of the arts – Although one may be given emphasis – literary, visual, spatial, musical, kinesthetic,
gustatory, and olfactory senses have to be harnessed and promoted together for maximum aesthetic
well-being.
3. Art is integrated with everyday life and not regarded as a separate activity - This implies that there will
be no special venues or spaces for art because it virtually exists wherever and whenever there is
human activity.
4. Equality of opportunity for participation in the artistic, creative process – no superstars, for the source
of power is not the individual, who is only a channel of divine inspiration or creativity. Thus, the author
or creator is often anonymous.
5. The artist is not separate from his audience or society, communal participation is the norm. - Unlike in
the West, there is no dichotomy of artist and society because art is not the specialist’s concern alone.
Everybody is expected to be an artist and participate in creative, expressive activities.
6. Flexibility of material, technical, and formal requirements. – No rigid or fixed standards dictate the
choice of materials, techniques, and forms for artistic creation and expression.
7. Use of available resources for artistic creation. – Art is not synonymous with big production costs
because what matters is artistic excellence or the creative idea as well as making art part of everyday
life. Thus, the least expensive mediums, e.g., paper for kites is regarded highly and not considered
inferior to the costlier ones. And even the most practical objects like a coconut grater, container, knife
handle, tree stump, mat, or hat can become a medium for the finest art.
8. Emphasis on the creative process rather than the finished product - Extemporaneous, improvisatory,
or spontaneous expressions of creativity a higher value than deliberate, often solitary,
conceptualization and composition of forms. This nurtures creative health and can inhibit mere idolizing
of masterpieces and obsession with permanence.
9. Simultaneity of conception and realization. – Affirmation of the creative imagination through the tradition
of instant mirroring or biofeedback, which, together with emphasis on the creative process, provides
an excellent condition for communal participation.

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3. News and information
Applied social science can provide encouragement and empowerment to underserved communities to
avail open and free media channels to voice out and to consume critical information. Increased vulnerability can
also be addressed like falling victim to online prostitution industry and blackmails and developing self-protection
from all sorts of personal threats. This ultimately leads to participatory, an ultimate empowerment of all peoples.
Participatory journalism and peer-to-peer cascading of news is taking a large share in news making and
will probably increase its capacity to share information in the future. We are entering an era where audience
employs self-censorship and plays a bigger role in engaging, remixing, commenting and ultimately filtering what
is important.

News and information in the Philippines

Mass media in the Philippines at present show two seemingly opposite trends: a small but noticeable
increase in the number of provincial newspapers, and a reduction in the number of radio stations in certain areas.
Two general features of the media situation, the private ownership of the media and the need for progressive
public service orientation, tend to be in conflict, as media resources are concentrated in large population centers.
The Philippine press has always been regarded as part of a greater national aspiration, and under martial law, it
is being encouraged to aid rural development in a practical way. Greater professionalism is also being mandated.
The following five areas of concern in journalism education and research need to be addressed: the low image of
journalism education with academia; the lack of local, relevant, teaching materials; students' ambivalence towards
research; the shortage of faculty to teach and conduct research; and the meager resources and facilities for
teaching and research.
The following general patterns can be observed in the evolution of the Philippine mass media. First,
newspapers, radio and television have long been privately owned, and have developed into very market-oriented
media. Most of the time, they are devoted to tabloid and sensational reporting, and they are mostly closely
connected with large and diversified corporations, and these have at times put limits on what got reported. Second,
in the face of attempts by powerful groups including politicians to control the media, particularly through bribery of
media practitioners and/or threatening the businesses of media owners there is always the counterbalance of
middle-class and "intelligent" audiences that demand better mainstream coverage. In short, the media, to compete
and become economically viable have been forced by their audiences to adopt a much more critical stance, and
this opened the way for independent journalism to emerge and for journalists and media practitioners to be
sensitive to public opinion.
Filipinos spend a lot of time on media. The landscape of Philippine media contains different aspects that
cater to the interest of the local audience. Television, radio, tabloid, and the online media market are aspects of
domestic media demand. On local TV, the ABS-CBN network is popular among the local audience. As of 2018,
the penetration rate of ABS CBN among the regions of Mindanao and Visayas were 52 percent and 53 percent,
respectively. The ABS CBN network is one of the Philippines' largest network in entertainment and media, with
revenue valued at approximately 40.1 billion Philippine pesos in 2018.
May 5, 2020, ABS-CBN went off air after the National Telecommunications Commission under the Duterte
administration issued a cease-and-desist order following the lapse of the network's broadcast franchise.

4. Education
In many instances, education has played a big role in reducing poverty, social exclusion, ignorance,
oppression, and war. From this perspective, the link between education and applied social sciences can be highly
interwoven. Quality education has an extremely relevant role in development that is truly global and national; one
that can ensure a just, inclusive, and sustainable future. The best defense for every individual group and
community is to have at least a good education that can empower them with the ability to defend themselves when
their rights are threatened and to take an active role in claiming what is due to them and contributing positively to
their communities as contributors to community well-being.

Education in the Philippine Setting

To live up to the standards and ideals of UNESCO with THE FOUR PILLARS OF EDUCATION –
―Learning to Know‖ ―Learning to Do‖, ―Learning to Live Together‖, ―Learning to Be‖ – and to addressing
declining educational standards in the Philippine education system during the first decade of the 21st century, the
Philippine government initiated structural changes in the basic education system and significantly boosted
education expenditures. Crucially, the ―Kindergarten Education Act‖, passed in 2011, enacted a mandatory pre-
elementary year of kindergarten education, while the ―2013 Basic Education Act‖, extended the elementary and
secondary education cycle from 10 to 12 years. The importance of this new 12-year education cycle (K-12), which
adds two years of mandatory senior secondary schooling for every Filipino student, cannot be understated. Until
the reforms, the Philippines was one of only three countries in the world (the other two being Angola and Djibouti),
with a 10-year basic education cycle. As such, the K-12 reforms are an essential step to improve the global
competitiveness of the Philippines and bring the country up to international standards. Implementation of the new
system is progressing on schedule and the first student cohort will graduate from the new 12- year system in 2018.
In addition, education spending was increased greatly: between 2005, when it hit its nadir, and 2014,
government spending on basic education, for instance, more than doubled. Spending per student in the basic
education system reached PHP 12,800 (USD $246) in 2013, a drastic increase over 2005 levels. And education
expenditures have grown even further since: In 2017, for instance, allocations for the Department of Education
were increased by fully 25 percent, making education the largest item on the national budget.

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 In 2018, allocations for education increased by another 1.7 percent and currently stand at PHP 533.31
billion (USD $ 10.26 billion), or 24 percent of all government expenditures (the second largest item on the national
budget). The higher education budget, likewise, was increased by almost 45 percent between 2016 and 2017. It
should be noted, however, that some of the spending increases are simply designed to cover additional costs
stemming from the K-12 reforms. To accommodate the reforms, 86,478 classrooms were constructed, and over
128,000 new teachers hired in the Philippines between 2010 and 2015 alone.
The government investments in education have led to substantial advances in standard indicators of
learning conditions, such as student-teacher and student-classroom ratios, both of which improved significantly
from 2010 to 2013, from 38:1 to 29:1 and from 64:1 to 47:1, respectively. Elementary school completion rates also
climbed from their 2005 low of under 70 percent to more than 83 percent in 2015. Net secondary school enrollment
rates, meanwhile, increased from under 60 percent in 2005 to 68.15 percent in 2015.
The biggest advances, however, were made in pre-school education. After the introduction of one year of
mandatory Kindergarten education in 2011, the net enrollment rate in kindergarten jumped from 55 percent (2010)
to 74.6 percent in 2015. Also encouraging was the fact that poorer families benefited strongly from the reforms.
The World Bank noted that in ―2008, the gross enrollment rate in kindergarten for the poorest 20 percent of the
population was 33 percent, but this had increased to 63 percent by 2013. Levels of kindergarten enrollment in the
Philippines now compare favorably with rates in other middle-income countries both within the region and globally”.
That said, the Philippines keeps trailing other Southeast Asian countries in a variety of education indicators
and the government has so far fallen short on several its own reform goals. Strong disparities continue to exist
between regions and socioeconomic classes – while 81 percent of eligible children from the wealthiest 20 percent
of households attended high school in 2013, only 53 percent of children from the poorest 20 percent of households
did the same. Progress on some indicators is sluggish, if not regressing completion rates at the secondary level,
for example, declined from 75 percent in 2010 to 74 percent in 2015, after improving in the years between.
Importantly, the Philippines government continues to spend less per student as a share of per capita GDP
than several other Southeast Asian countries, the latest budget increases notwithstanding. It also remains to be
seen how the K-12 reforms will affect indicators like teacher-to-student ratios. In October 2015, it was estimated,
that the government still needed to hire 43,000 teachers and build 30,000 classrooms in order to implement the
changes. Strong population growth will also continue to put pressures on the education system. The Philippines
has one of the highest birth rates in Asia, and the government expects the population to grow to 142 million people
by 2045.
5. Socialization and Enculturation
The last element of the five elements of meaning production in culture, ideal-real or worldview ethos, has
to do with the subtle ambiguity in what people consider should be (worldview) versus what is (ethos). For example,
in the Philippines, we accept the man is the head of the house. But there are many instances in which women are
the head of the house or the family.
We often assume that we are born with culture, but actually we learn it. We acquire it over time from
upbringing, observing, participating and active imitation and simulation of our social environment reality.
Nowadays, most people, as Filipinos, are multicultural, operating in two or more cultural mediums. The
moment that one encounters a new culture and begin to make sense of it or actively learn it, he or she is
undergoing the acculturation process.

III. Engagement
Written Work: Activity 1:
A. Enumeration
Directions: Name at least five artworks you know that is done by a Filipino artist.
1. ________________________________________________________
2. ________________________________________________________
3. ________________________________________________________
4. ________________________________________________________
5. ________________________________________________________

B. Essay
Directions: Answer the following questions to the best of your ability. Write down at least three
sentences for each question. (Five points each)

1. Explain how journalism and mass media has progressed in the Philippines.

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 2. Explain how Filipinos today can be considered multicultural.

IV. Application
Performance Task: Additional Activity
Directions: Review UNESCO’s four pillars of education as discussed in Lesson 2 and
revisited in this module. Describe how each pillar can be manifested in the life of the Filipino
citizen.

Prepared by:

FRANCHESKA VENIZE B. REVILLOSA

Teacher I

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