The folktales brought together in this volume come from Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines—three neighbouring societies whose histories, cultures, languages, and traditions have long developed within an interconnected Southeast Asian world. Each community has its own distinctive cultural expressions, yet readers will also encounter familiar landscapes, relationships, dilemmas, hopes, and moral questions across the stories. Mountains and forests, villages and royal courts, seas and islands, parents and children, leaders and ordinary people, human beings and the natural world all become settings in which questions of dignity, responsibility, justice, freedom, spirituality, and coexistence are explored.

It is in this spirit that we approach Maphilindo as a shared cultural space. We do not use the term to suggest that Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines possess a single culture, nor do we seek to erase the differences among their peoples and traditions. On the contrary, the value of this collection lies precisely in the possibility of encountering both similarity and difference. Maphilindo, in the context of this book, becomes a space of cultural conversation: a way of placing stories beside one another so that readers may recognise connections while respecting the uniqueness of the communities from which those stories emerge.

This perspective is particularly important for Global Citizenship Education (GCED). Becoming a global citizen does not require abandoning one’s local identity, cultural memory, or inherited traditions. Global awareness can begin close to home. It begins when young people learn to understand the values embedded in their own communities, listen seriously to the experiences of others, question injustice, recognise shared human dignity, and see themselves as participants in a world larger than their immediate surroundings.

For this reason, the folktales in this book are presented not simply as cultural artefacts to be preserved, but as living educational resources. Their significance does not end with remembering what earlier generations told. They invite each new generation to ask what those stories might mean under changing social conditions.