Editor’s Note: Publication as an expression of unending care

Abstract

With the increasing demands of time brought by an uncertain global health crisis, most educators are torn between instruction and their means to survive education in the new normal. Aside from instruction being the elemental core of any academic institution, higher education faculty members are thereby also mandated to be active in producing functional knowledge through research involvement, conduct extension programs to uplift the lives of community constituents and production mechanisms.

The inaugural version of TARAN-AWAN Journal of Educational Research and Technology Management embodies EVSU-TC’s commitment to addressing this four-fold mandate of the higher education system. Faculty members, staff, students, and stakeholders constantly believing publication as a path to communicate results of scholarly works not only to its respondents, more so to the end recipients as expressions of the unending cycle and as an art of human caring.  

Valuable works of budding researchers across the regional territories are then featured. The studies involving students and their behaviors towards learning are core ingredients of this year’s version. Innovative teaching and learning approaches opened new opportunities for students to capture explorative experiences to effectuate academic performance are highlighted in the work of Ian Maglines in Southern Leyte. This resulted in influencing factors to consider student’s career preferences among senior high school, as documented by Brenda Dublin and the company of Tanauan, Leyte.

The work of Belinda Basa and company in 2020, able to articulate teaching competencies of science educators and student’s satisfaction; mathematical skills, and perceived level of importance (Eduardo E. C. Cornillez, Jr.)  in the context of today’s educational landscape. Perception studies among accountancy students (Joshua Salceda) and the application of machine learning to predict student performances which employed correlation and predictive study designs of Roxan Morilla and others proved that research can be done even in the absence of physical means of data collection.

Truly, the art of caring is expressed not only from the medical point of view but by anybody whose heart is fueled with the desire to decreasing the gap of known and the unknown. Those who are called to practice this art may rarely have the experience or education to guide them. Though at first it created fear and turns lives upside down due to numerous revisions and critiques from reviewers, the understanding of producing worth-to-read journals invigorates the soul.

Finally, I am calling all the men and women to be actively involved in this exercise and become part of that thin thread connecting to the world to live. Through these years of ministering, my commendation for the privilege of working closely with the journal staff and technical working group for sharing with me this rare opportune of founding new avenues for preaching research as expressions of our unending care, something to carry on as I venture onwards.