Wayward & Fanciful
Editing an editor
On 22-23 November 2008, the Region XI chapter of the Philippine Association of Graduate Education (PAGE) hosted the 1st PAGE Mindanao Zonal Conference at the Brokenshire Resort and Convention Center in Madapo Hills, Davao City. The theme was "Graduate Education in the Context of Mindanao Development through Responsible Research".
During the conference, the upgraded PAGE XI Educational Research Journal was launched. While PAGE XI had published several editions of journal of abstracts in the years past, this is the first time that it has worked with full articles – ten of them. One of these is mine.
I had been privy to the efforts of PAGE XI to animate academic publications in Mindanao. In fact, I had been among the resource persons for a training session for editors that it held last year.
So it is with much dismay that I read my article as it came out in the PAGE Educational Research Journal volume 1 which was distributed to those who attended the zonal conference. The title is wrong, the abstract is inappropriate, and the reference list lacks important details like the websites I cited. The proofreaders also missed some lines misplaced from where they were cut to where they should have been pasted.
I can only hope that those who got this copy of the journal would do what many academic pretenders do -- put it on the display shelf where it can watch the world go by. I also hope that the rare reader who does labor through reading this article would not impute the glaring (to these eyes anyway) errors as being a product of sloppy work on the writer's part part.
Editorial policies -- including the right to change the title, do rewrites where deemed necessary, and withhold final form from the author's review owing to lack of time and the assumption that she would be so busy to bother -- are to be respected. Bow. Just don't embarrass the writer and make her readers impute horrible things about her professional credibility.
My professional mortification notwithstanding, I hold no animosity towards the editors and the proofreaders. I understand perfectly how errors in publication could happen and I am convinced that this mistake did not stem from malicious intent on their part.
Errata, then.
The article is about the military rebellions in the late 1980s, not about the one in Oakwood. Trillanes and company merely gave the inspiration and the urgency for doing this paper.
The abstract should read as it does on the PAGE XI Zonal Conference souvenir program, if I may bother the participants to compare:
A phenomenological study of the socialization process to military rebellion in the Philippines, the paper identified the social and cultural factors and explained how these affect the sequential stages of conscientization, politicization and conversion of the soldiers who took part in the 1986, 1987 and 1989 coup attempts through interpretative phenomenological analysis of data from twelve in-depth interviews.
Findings showed that conscientization is likely to occur when the soldier: 1) possesses a quality of mind that actively seeks out to make sense of his experience; 2) finds glaring contradictions between expectations from preservice training and the realities of soldiering on the ground; and 3) has difficulty resolving ambiguity in the interpretation of the Soldier's Code of Conduct. Politicization is aided largely by the influence of other soldiers and the military dictums for information management and troop unity. The formal and informal discussion groups in the military create the climate that pushes for conformity and consensus. The crucial factors in conversion include how the perception of an embattled military and the need of the Filipino people for social justice play on the soldier's sense of obligation.
This explanatory study attempted a serious sensitivity to the human dimensions of individual creativity and subjective meaning-making in the socialization to rebellion.
(Wayward and Fanciful is Gail Ilagan's column for MindaViews, the opinion section of MindaNews. Ilagan teaches Social Justice, Family Sociology, Theories of Socialization and Psychology at the Ateneo de Davao University where she is also the associate editor of Tambara. You may send comments to gail.ilagan@gmail.com.This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it "Send at the risk of a reply," she says.)