KAMP and Dr. JP Catungal receive Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist Project award
By Ted Alcuitas
A Filipino scholar and a community-led mentorship program will receive the Antipode Foundation Scholar-Activist, one of six awards given this year.
UBC’s Dr. John Paul Catungal and KAMP ( Kababayan Academic Mentorship Program) will collaborate to conduct research on how mentorship can be used as a ‘political practice’.
The project will examine mentorship as a form of community building through which members of the Filipino-Canadian community in Greater Vancouver / Coast Salish territories respond to the disproportionately high rates of educational incompletion among Filipino-Canadian school-aged youth.
Founded in 2008,KAMP (http://www.kamp.education) is a community-led mentorship program that provides academic and social support to newly arrived Metro Vancouver Filipino-Canadian youth.
By providing mentorship and positive role models, KAMP aims to empower youths and provide them with the confidence they need to integrate and thrive in the Canadian public education system.
Dr. John Paul Catungal completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Toronto, and is now a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow with the Institute of Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice at University of British Columbia. Dr. Catungal is an instructor in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies with UBC’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice. His research interests include the politics of emotions, embodiment and positionalities in teaching and learning spaces; queer of colour geographies; and Filipino-Canadian studies.
Despite having parents with university degrees, Filipino youths have ben found to have one of the lowest rates of university completion and among the highest high-school dropouts.
KAMP recognizes the challenges faced by our community’s youth and seeks to provide the necessary supports to meet those challenges, among them: barriers to high school completion, academic challenges particularly in English language , social isolation and limited networks.including the effects of family separation and immigration.
KAMP also recognizes the problems faced by youth in navigating the education system at the secondary and post-secondary level.