Dear Students,
The Junior Engagement Program (JEEP) is not your typical requirement in your junior year but rather it is a course outside your classroom. It is one of the core components of the Integrated Ateneo Formation (InAF) four-year formation program that encourages your heart to learn. It hopes to immerse students in the reality of various marginalized sectors, engage them with the people who work in the marginal sectors, and gain insights about what it is like to be "with" them.
The Junior Engagement Program (JEEP) is not your typical requirement in your junior year but rather it is a course outside your classroom. It is one of the core components of the Integrated Ateneo Formation (InAF) four-year formation program that encourages your heart to learn. It hopes to immerse students in the reality of various marginalized sectors, engage them with the people who work in the marginal sectors, and gain insights about what it is like to be "with" them.
Our hopes as formators of the program is to form students who will be in solidarity with the society regardless of race, color, social status, and level of education, etc. This is done through experiencing labor with them. The call for students is not only to perform tasks but also to create relationships with the people on the margins.
We also aim to embody the Filipino values that make us one. Since the Philippines is known for the jeepneys, we believe that naming the program JEEP could be an avenue to inculcate the students our values that constitutes a culture for solidarity. Because every time we ride on a jeep we unwittingly exercise our core Filipino values such as pakikipagkapwa (sharing of oneself to the other), pakikiramdam (sharing through feeling), pagbibigayan (giving); and this happens through sharing a seat, handing a fare, offering seats to the elderly. We perform these regardless of our social status. Rich and poor no longer make a difference. We share our individual being with anyone even with total strangers. People are just people. When we are on a jeep, we create participatory and mutual relationships. We become one. And this is the idea of JEEP, to bridge the students with the people in the marginal sectors through performing various tasks and working with them. Once students are immersed in different activities and able to recognize their Filipino Values, they will be challenged to look deeper into their own thinking and be liberated by the issues underlying the situations of the marginalized sectors.
The Office for Social Concern and Involvement (OSCI), Department of Philosophy, other academic departments, and different partner institutions have worked together to bring the JEEP to the students. The students will go to their assigned areas once a week (4 hours per visit) for a month to perform different tasks (e.g. barker, laborer, fish vendor, government worker, litter picker, salesman, sales lady, assistant caregiver, baggage counter, etc.) The formators from the OSCI guide the JEEP journey of the students through integration and social analysis sessions. The program gives students opportunity to engage with the people they see in their everyday lives but have not had any personal interaction with them. Students, in the course of their JEEP formation must let the reality come to their lives. They must let these different experiences, whether they are experiences of work or relationships with people, serve as an invitation to respond with the spirit of cura personalis to the innocent suffering of the people in the marginalized sectors.
As an ending statement, let us quote Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach truism, when the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change.
(From Left to Right)
Top: CB Bernardo, Gelo Paterno
Bottom: Carizza Anticamara, Kiko Aurellano, Grace Zaballero, Dana Buñag
Top: CB Bernardo, Gelo Paterno
Bottom: Carizza Anticamara, Kiko Aurellano, Grace Zaballero, Dana Buñag
