Monday, June 23, 2008 A shared passion for education By Jenara Regis Newman
JOSE and Delia (Aliño) Villacastin have spent all their working lives in the academe. Villacastin took up law in San Beda College but instead of making law his career, he became a teacher in the Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT), handling history and political science. In 1978, he became acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts, now College of Arts and Sciences. From there, he became dean of men and finally school registrar. Retired last May, he still is consultant of the registrar’s office in the school he had spent all of his working life.
Delia, on the other hand, has taught in several schools and has finished other courses beside her AB major in speech and drama which she took in Immaculate Heart College in Hollywood, California. Her masters in education she got from the Cebu Normal University. She also took a special diploma course on Instructional Technology from Northern Illinois University at De Kalb, Illinois. At the University of San Jose Recoletos, she took up human resource management.
Unlike Villacastin who was always with CIT, Delia taught speech improvement and drama as literature in St. Theresa’s College and directed the annual school plays at which Laurice Guillen (now a noted movie director) was one her brighter talents.
Delia also taught literature and speech improvement in the University of San Carlos for four years. In 1964, when she got married, she started to teach in CIT and was department chairperson for audio visual and speech lab. She became dean of women in 1968 and held that position for 13 years. She was head of the Department of Instructional Communication Technology (DICT) from 1983 until her retirement last May and, in concurrent capacity, she was dean for academic programs from 1985 to 2006. She is still consultant for DICT.
Both husband and wife have found teaching a noble and rewarding profession, For Villacastin: “Teaching was a good way to reach young people, to help them become professionals.” As for Delia, she finds a change in the way students take their education. Before, they were strongly grounded in the humanities but now, the focus is on high technology.
She says: “That in spite of it all, I still believe in the humanities as the strongest foundation for the 21st century man – that’s why I stuck to theater because, like Shakespeare, ‘All the world is stage and all the men and women in it merely players. They have their exits and their entrances.’ I have exited CIT but I have entered advocacies, principally in living values education.
“We’ve been doing this for the past four years and we’re reaching out to teachers especially in basic education, elementary and high school. It’s a very significant gear shift for me and it seems that the work that I did in education prepared me for
this.”
Delia, who is very much more in the limelight because of the nature of theater says: “Nothing would have happened if he were not supportive.”
Now, aside from being CIT consultants, they’re still working together. They help daughter Mary Rose Maghuyop manage her prep/elementary school, Our Lady of Joy in Jugan, Consolacion, as school registrar and principal.
And Delia still continues her work in theater with a musical play coming up, “The Song of Bernadette.” It is slated for the last weekend of June and the first weekend of July.
