The Oblation on Our Minds: Teaching the Oblation in the Time of the Pandemic

Abstract

Following Judy Celine Ick’s suggestion that storytelling is the mode of pedagogy in a Humanities classroom, this study attempts to explore how an artwork becomes a myriad of possible stories and concepts related to the nature of art even if studied from a distance. By way of analyzing the narratives, myths, discourses, and constructs surrounding the UP Oblation among selected freshman students of ARTS 1 in First Semester 2020-2021, the study discovered the epistemic binaries that exist within the body of the statue. This proves that the Oblation is always already a historical construction of ritualization and profanity. It also delves into realizing a method by which students can read against the grain of the dominant story on the statue’s surface by adapting the dialogical or problem-posing method in Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It reveals how students can voice the story of art and thereby unearth and/or foreground the possibilities of critical reflection and personal action through digital archives, digital stories, and story threads. This study proposes that assessments on artistic and theoretical concepts in the Humanities can be done through personal narratives and thus resist the passivity promoted by a banker-educator/ depositor-student relationship that currently exists on online platforms. Also, it provides insight to the possibility of a future digital archive about UPLB which focuses on narratives, icons, art, history, places of memory, and people of the UPLB community.