To be quite honest, I really had a hard time getting into the Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire.  Maybe it was my mood, maybe my brain was just full from all of my other projects but it was initially a tough read.  I felt a bit oppressed myself as I slogged through chapter 1… but then, I got to chapter 2 and Friere’s earlier thoughts started to come into focus.

I especially liked the “banking” model of education and it’s relationship to oppression in the world of education.  Something I have often felt but never articulated as Freire did.  Now on to chapter 3 and beyond.  I’m excited to find a bit more time to learn more about problem posing education and how Freire thinks in relationship to other topics.

Overall a good read.

Hi everyone,

I’m glad to be joining the FabLearn team – I’ve spent some time looking through the blog posts (not all!) and the Google Drive content. I’m starting to understand a bit about what you all have been doing, and it looks great and VERY ambitious! Congratulations for getting so much started so quickly!

What I’d like to do to start is to offer some “office hours” for informal support. This can be either by phone, Skype, a hangout, or whatever works for you. Next week I’ll block off an hour or two and schedule 30 minutes at a time. If people want to do individual meetings or meet with their guru team that’s fine with me. What I haven’t seen is a shared Google calendar – have I missed that?

I’ve had a few people contact me about reading their writing and providing comments so I’m happy to do that too. If you send me writing – just let me know what sort of help you would like. I can provide public or private comments at any stage of the writing you would like.

Looking forward to getting to know all of you!

Sylvia Martinez

twitter: smartinez

email: sylvia@inventtolearn.com

skype: sylviakmartinez

phone: 310-567-4243

In Chapter 1 of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” Freire defines his theory and identifies the oppressor and the oppressed. He writes of how in order to liberate the oppressed and to provide a meaningful educational experience, the “learner” must be actively involved in the construction of their education. Traditional pedagogies maintain this power dichotomy by teaching with “the banking model of education” where content and information is passed from those with power to those without power. Freire calls for a new and transformative pedagogy to be developed where the oppressed have a voice and learning is based upon personal interests and curiosities and where subject matter is connected to the lives of those doing the learning.

I often think about what it would look like to attempt to apply these ideas where students are allowed a voice and participate and share in the process of learning. We hear many reasons that students are disengaged from school, yet these same students will display a passion and motivation for learning many difficult things when outside the confines and constraints of the school.

“The fundamental goal of dialogical teaching is to create a process of learning and knowing“. pg 17 introduction Donaldo Macedo

““Dialogical education” and situating learning within students’ lived experience have been vastly influential, but the implementation of these ideas has never been unchallenging (Freire, 1973, 1974, 1992)” Blikstein, TRAVELS IN TROY WITH FREIRE

Are these students disinterested because they are used to school being what they feel is a waste of their time? They have “gotten good at school”, they know exactly what they need to do, and what they don’t have to do? Is there a way to re-engage students, to give them a meaningful

“Digital technologies, such as computers, robotics, digital video, and digital photography, could play a central role in this process: they are protean machines (Papert, 1980) that enable diverse and innovative ways of working, expressing, and building.”  Blikstein, TRAVELS IN TROY WITH FREIRE

What does choice really mean? 
If I look around the room during my Makerspace I see passion, choice, hard work, personal interest and intrinsic motivation. Sure, these are students who have chosen to be here during their 45 minute lunch and recess period. These are students who bring with them an interest in creating with the computer, or building robots, or learning more about physical computing. These students know they have made a choice to be in the room, and they are able to choose what kind of project they would like to work on.

We can’t confuse choice with “do whatever you want”. If I were to give an open ended choice to one of my classes, many would choose “nothing” or “browsing sneaker images on the Internet”. Anything else suggested would be an affront to them, “why do I have to do that” they would tell me, and they often openly admit to being lazy and not wanting to do anything but sit with their friends and chat.

As an educator it is not my responsibility to inspire them, to provide spaces and openings in subjects and content that they haven’t yet been exposed to, to open up new worlds for them? But how do I reach all the students and tap into all of their interests within the current structure of the public middle school? I teach all the students in the school, they are required to be in my class, which meets twice a week. My curriculum spans a range of digital content areas, creative opportunities, but there are still a few students in each of the classes of 30 that tune out.

The process of “deschooling”
Can we ever hope to “de-school” working from within the constraints and boundaries that have existed for so long and with which both teachers and students rarely question the inequality and lack of agency that most traditional pedagogies work from? Are there tools and methodologies that can be put in place to allow for the “dialogical education” that Freire so eloquently writes about?

“In addition, the more students learn in this fashion, the more they learn about learning itself: students learning to learn is more generative that students only learning content.” Blikstein, TRAVELS IN TROY WITH FREIRE

i am planning for a workshop for our teachers at our school.

this is one of the  pre-workshop reading. I find it short, simple and easy to look at Constructionism especially
for the new comers or even for experienced ones to revisit its core. 🙂

http://learning.media.mit.edu/courses/mas713/readings/Constructionism%20-%20Falbel.pdf

I love my work. It feels rewarding to me, in comparison to many other options. I also love my work because it forces me to put down my iced coffee on a Sunday afternoon in the stunning sunlit springtime of Northern California, and think. I sheepishly admit that I was lamenting the loss of a third weekend in a row, due to work and other professional ends, when I began reading Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire. Not long after sitting down to complete the task, a friend of mine, Edward Wilson (a retired Yale trained anthropologist who is currently studying a syncretistic model of Mayan religious practice) joined me. “Its been ages since I read that,” remarked Edward of Freire’s work. It was then that we began discussing one of the more famous eras of oppression, when the Europeans came to North and Central America to spread Catholicism. The Spanish Inquisition stands as one of the most horrific examples of the use of violence by a dominant group to suppress indigenous pedagogy. In chapter one of Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire states with no hesitation:

The struggle for humanization [for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons] is possible only because dehumaniza­tion, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppres­sors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

In this quote, Freire suggests that violence and oppression are the result of not just one group’s unethical use of their tool kit for oppression, but rather the result of a belief that violence is the only solution to conflicting pedagogies. This quote also reminds us that oppression is the result of one shared pedagogy, one in which the dominant group stands to gain (either financially or politically) from the oppression of another group.

Freire’s model of oppression might be well illustrated by the events of the Spanish inquisition, when ancient knowledge or beliefs collided with the socio-political world of Christianity. The story is more complicated, however and Freire offers this window of hope, “Only power that springs from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”  I have never heard a more optimistic statement in my life, as it suggests that the path to freedom (from oppression) is inherently the responsibility of the oppressed to forge. Freire continues on this idea when he says, “Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift.” In the case of the Mayans, conquest was not won through violent ends, but rather through a system of subversion that has lasted for hundreds of years.

The Richness of the Pre-Columbian Mayan Pedagogy

At its height,The Mayan civilization was vast in population (they inhabited more than 40 sizeable cities across modern-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and northern Belize), as well as technological achievement. Mayan healers had vast knowledge of the healing powers of plants. The Mayans kept detailed records of solar, lunar and other planetary patterns in books or codices to inform much of their daily efforts in agriculture and engineering. They invented their own geometry for the purposes of art and construction of cities, as well as the concept of zero as a placeholder for calculating large amounts. Priests and shamans in the Mayan culture were functionally astronomers, mathematicians and ethnobotanists in terms of their knowledge base.

By the mid-1500’s Spanish Catholic Friars had established missionaries all over the Americas with the goal of converting indigenous peoples to Christianity. Under the leadership of Bishop de Landa,  friars attempted to speed up the process of conversion by linking images of Catholic dietes to those of pre-columbian gods and goddesses responsible for the well-being and balance of the Mayan people. Mary the Mother of Christ, also known as the Virgin de Guadalupe, was marketed as the “Goddess of Corn,” for instance and remains the most beloved and representative image of Mexican culture today.

Although nearly all of the books containing Mayan records were destroyed by the Spanish during this time, the Mayan’s were never fully converted to Catholicism (a religion that lacked practical application for the Mayans). Mayans who refused to publicly convert to Catholicism suffered public penance rituals, some as brutal as burning at the stake. Never the less, Mayans held onto their old knowledge and belief systems by practicing behind closed doors.  When a Mayan got sick, their family had a choice, go see a catholic priest or an old-world shaman who had knowledge of herbal healing and perhaps a direct connection to god. “They lived in two different worlds in terms of what they saw as important and how they organized their world,”  says Edward.

In the case of the Mayans, ancient pedagogy, passed down from practitioner to practitioner and through the codices (later destroyed) was preserved in the face of attempts to obliterate and replace it by a pedagogy that supported the political models of Rome’s vatican. Mayan’s who wished to retain their ancient beliefs and practices, subverted the violence of the Spanish by going underground, a method that has been working  to this day.

Our current models of education: Do they support or combat systems of oppression?

If you are reading this, then chances are you are aware of the failings of the modern school system. Not only is our current educational system an artifact of the industrial revolution in its treatment of children as standard units, it stands to support the kind of oppression that our current economic models need to survive. Access to higher education in our country is becoming less and less open, that is if your goal is to attend an accredited four year college. Programs that teach applied trades (such as mechanics or shop class) are disappearing in our k-12 schools due to lack of funding and a cultural attitude that thinking with your hands is less valuable than becoming a knowledge worker.  Enter the Maker Movement in education.

Making in the classroom stands as a perfect living example of one of Freire’s recommendations when he states, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.” Recognizing our roles as guides, rather than “bankers,” allows the learner in everyone to have a voice about what they know and what they want to know.  Validating our students’ prior knowledge or passions by allowing students to design their curriculum is easily supported in a maker classroom.  Co-constructing a path of learning with our students models a peaceful, as well as effective method for increasing literacy in any field. This emerging “hack your education” movement is now freeing students to design their own curriculum using effective, entertaining and readily accessible digital tools. Students also have the ability to publish their work on a variety of forums from Instagram to Make Magazine to Scientific Journals for Middle and High Schoolers who are solving real world problems, adding the value of authentic assessment to their educational experience as well.

Making in Education has the potential to deliver democracy back into our educational models, in a time when the dominant pedagogy stands as an indefatigable barrier. Like the Mayans, who practice their true beliefs behind doors, making in education, and its inherent use of student driven problem based curriculum, is still marginalized in our schools in a way that does not threaten the status quo. More and more, however, we are being polarized by the child-centered promise of progressive education and education anchored by an oppressive industrial model of humanity. Will the only two possible consequences of this tention be to continue hiding behind non-threatening enrichment programs or to conduct an all out violent revolt? I don’t know, but this mestiza is sticking around to find out.

References:

1. Caballero Mariscal, David. 2012. Mayan- q´eqchi´religious Syncretism. Between transculturality and cultural preservation. Advanced Research in Scientific Areas. December, 3. – 7. 2012 University of Granada, Spain file:///Users/loaner/Downloads/Mayan-%20q%C2%B4eqchi%C2%B4religiou.pdf
2. Crawford, Mathew B. 2009. Shop Class as Soulcraft, an inquiry into the value of work. The Penguin Press http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html?pagewanted=all
3. Demarest,  Arthur. 2004. Ancient Maya: The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization. Cambridge University Press
4. Freire, Paulo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The Continuum International Publishing Group, Inc. New York, NY
5. Lara-Alecio, Rafael; Irby, Beverly J.; Morales-Aldana, Leonel. 1998. A mathematics Lesson from the Mayan Civilization.Teaching Children Mathematics, Nov 98, Vol. 5 Issue 3, p154
6. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html
7. Wilson, Edward (Anthropologist)
8. Photo Credit: Diego de Landa burning Maya cult images and codices. Mural byFernando Castro Pacheco from Wikipedia

by Keith Ostfeld

I and many of my fellow educators at the Children’s Museum of Houston have long held a belief that children need to be provided with a free-choice learning environment that stimulates hands-on, minds-on, open-ended explorations into phenomena to help them construct their understanding of topics that interest them. We believe that what we and other children’s museums and science centers provide is access to application of ideas and phenomenological explorations that often fly in the face of “common sense understanding.”

For me, this belief came from the way that I learn and the sorts of environments that stimulated me as a learner. For me, math was always easy. I was a math teacher’s worst nightmare – the kid who instinctively understood what needed to be done almost as the lesson began, finished the classwork and homework within the first 20 minutes of class, and then checked out of class, either running ahead through the rest of the week’s work, doing work for other classes, or, worst, disrupting everyone around me. Unlike many kids who hated math because they didn’t “get it,” I found math boring because I understood what to do, but rarely understood the application for what I was learning – Papert’s idea that many classrooms give “mathematics learners scarce resources for making sense of what they are learning.”

As I read through Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms, I found myself excitedly nodding along, recognizing many of my own beliefs in how we should be teaching children laid out in wonderfully detailed language. I, myself, am a proud member of “Logo learners” who did many of the exercises he describes as child on, at the risk of dating myself, a Commodore 64, which I’m sure had a far greater impact than I may realize on my own educational philosophies, philosophies that so often conflicted with traditional classrooms that I not only checked out as a learner (often spending more time trying to figure out the precise bare minimum needed to maintain my GPA than on my actual classwork), but eventually left formal education altogether because my administrations regulated me away from what I felt…what I KNEW…about how I should be teaching my students. As Papert said, “We are in the process of digging ourselves into an anachronism by preserving practices that have no rational basis beyond their historical roots in an earlier period of technological and theoretical development.”

So, on March 14th, I found myself MCing our annual Pi Day Pie Fight event, the apex of a series of activities and events we hold each year to celebrate Pi Day (which fortunately for us always seems to fall during Spring Break – peak attendance time!). And, as in prior years, I was asked the question, “So why do you celebrate Pi Day.” And, as I took in a breath to launch into my usual schpiel about the importance of Pi, I paused for a moment. I realized that what we do with all of the activities surrounding Pi Day (even the silly fluff events like a pie fight), isn’t about Pi per se. It’s about stilling fears in children about math by giving meaning to math. By giving it an environment and a purpose, we bring it to life. Kids get to watch it breathe and move, and realize how interwoven it is throughout their lives. I’ve been asked many questions by kids at our Math Cart, and two stick with me:

“This is fun. Why isn’t our math in school like this?”

“This isn’t math, so why do you call it Math Cart?”

Here, math isn’t about rote calculations, but actually, really doing math, just like I many other Logo learners walked out our problems in front of old computers which, to us then, were bright, beautiful, and we had no idea they had anything to do with math.

In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves;  they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.   

– Paulo Freire

As soon as I reread the work of Paulo Freire and began to put his thoughts in conversation with the making education organizing at Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn, I remembered this rap poem “Let’s Show Off!”  A few years ago, Mel King and I were working with a group of teenaged youth teachers and considering how to help them get ready for their role as teachers and STEM ambassadors among Boston’s elementary and middle school-aged youth.  One day during our circle-up, Mel asked the youth teachers to create poems or raps about why they believed STEM was important.

Jammy Torres, a 17 year old youth teacher at the time wrote this:

Let’s Show Off!  

When people look at us, do you believe they see,

Our knowledge, our accomplishments, our ambitions?

All they see are the colors, nothing more,

From the color of our hair to the skin that we wear.

Instead of taking offense, let’s show off. . .

Put them in a state of convolution

when the words flowing from your mouth are words of wisdom.

For once, let’s show them we too can create.

We too can transcend above the world

So, let’s show off!

Let’s diminish the misconception of us and the life we live.

Let’s not retaliate against the ignorance of others with violence,

Because that will only hurt them physically,

And that is morally unjust

Let’s retaliate with our knowledge because that will get us

A home, one without bars.

This will get us a dream and help us prevail to the stars!

So let’s show off!

Let’s help them not to misconstrue,

But to see depth in the real you.

Break barriers, pave paths.

You lead the way and you change the world.

Thinking with Paulo and Jammy, I realize there are a number of interesting insights about how maker education spaces can also be structured as liberatory spaces, especially for our youth of color, young women and youth living with low incomes.  I believe that makerspaces can counteract both the oppressive forces that youth face in both their communities and in schools.

Creating conditions for praxis for liberation while we build robots

“Authentic liberation — the process of humanization — is not another deposit to be made in [youth].  Liberation is a praxis:  the action and reflection of [youth] upon their world in order to transform it.”  

— Paulo Freire

From the beginning of Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn eleven years ago, we have always been guided by hands-on making in the constructionist spirit of Seymour Papert, giving youth opportunities to reflect on and share the process of making and what they make with others.  According to Seymour, having what youth make become “public entities,” allows for the most technology and engineering learning to happen.  When our youth engage in the spirit of hands-on learning through creating authentic STEM projects that are chosen by and meaningful to them, they also interrupt some of what Paulo calls  “education as banking” model where information is deposited by teachers “into” students’ minds.

I am sure that you, like me, find that the very nature of imagining and creating hands-on making projects with our youth nearly always involves unanticipated challenges for us and our youth to be “simultaneously teachers and students.” For youth to be successful, you probably have also found that, as Paulo says, it is necessary to have a “profound trust in [youth] and their creative power.”

This is essential, but insufficient.  Paulo also calls on us to imagine how to push further.  He urges us to have the action and reflection we do with our youth — our “praxis” —  also be about finding creative ways to analyze the ways that current education practices dehumanize us and how together we might create changes in how we learn together so that our learning becomes love-in-action and allows our humanity to be acknowledged and shine through.   Our work as education organizers is to create conditions so that, as Paulo says, “sooner or later being less human leads [our youth] to struggle against those who made them so. . . become. . . restorers of the humanity” for themselves, for us as teachers and for the mandated education structures that too often dehumanize them.

When I think about Jammy’s rap poem, I see that in her heart — as in many of the hearts of our youth — she has moments of developing her “power to perceive critically the way [she] exists in the world with which and in which [she] finds [herself].”  Her reflection — addressed to herself, her peers, the caring adults around her and the community— is that,

“When people look at us, do you believe they see

Our knowledge, our accomplishments, our ambitions?

All they see are the colors, nothing more

From the color of our hair to the skin that we wear.”

Jammy doesn’t stop with her reflection on the conditions that dehumanize her, she also argues that, in acting out against this dehumanization, youth must strive for liberation, not strive for the power of those who oppress them.  She is cautioning against youth taking on oppression as their “model of humanity.” This is something Paulo also points out, arguing that often the “structure of [youth’s] thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped.”  Jammy says,

“Let’s not retaliate against the ignorance of others with violence

Because that will only hurt them physically

And that is morally unjust.”

She also suggests how “showing off” her skills and inventions as a creative maker with technology and engineering can be a transformative act:

“For once, let’s show them we too can create.

We too can transcend above the world.”

“Let’s diminish the misconception of us and the life we live.”

“Let’s retaliate with our knowledge because that will get us

A home, one without bars.

This will get us a dream and help us prevail to the stars!”

“Let’s help them not to misconstrue

But to see depth in the real you.

Break barriers, pave paths.

You lead the way and you change the world.”

If youth show off what they have the capacity to make and teach they can interrupt the oppression that they experience in the community because of their cultural, social and economic position in the world.

What would Paulo add to Jammy’s poem if he were in conversation with it?  I believe he would point out that when youth engage in the “problem-posing” education approach of making, they also have the capacity to heal and transform the wounds they have experience with the public education system.

Youth often struggle with making because they have been socialized for banking education and often have not had many opportunities to exercise the muscle of their own imagination, analysis and dreams. As Seymour says, “. . . so often do they hear that they are good for nothing, no know nothing and are incapable of learning anything. . . that in the end they become convinced of their own unfitness. . . Given the circumstances which have produced their duality, it is only natural that they distrust themselves.”  Making and showing off presents a transformative opportunity for youth to turn away from some of these beliefs and for developing a deep self-efficacy, when they look at what they have made and say, “I can do that!”

When we go out into the community or speak to groups about Learn 2 Teach, Teach 2 Learn, Mel often asks people who are interested in our model to read Jammy’s rap poem out loud and reflect on it.  This has had a tremendous impact on people.  Recently, we participated in a nationwide funding competition to seed STEM mentoring programs in a handful of cities across the United States.  Finalists from different city groups gathered to brainstorm how to strengthen and improve their mentoring program designs.  As we listened to each city group’s mentoring plans, they all focused on the role of caring adults in mentoring youth, a kind of “banking model” of mentoring.  Mel had the whole group read Jammy’s rap poem out loud and asked why no one believed that our youth had the capacity to be mentors and role models for each other.  After experiencing Jammy’s rap poem and Mel’s question, almost every city group included youth and peer mentoring in their STEM mentoring model.

Indeed, if we create liberatory conditions in our makerspaces, youth have the capacity to not only make cool things like robots.  Through their praxis — of reflecting on the deeper meaning of their actions — they can help point their peers and the adults around them towards acting in ways that acknowledge the humanity of all.

Paulo Freire, in his book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, highlights the effects of oppression, based on his background and the challenges he faced in reconciling his Brazilian tradition and culture with the new educational environment brought about by colonization. This brings into the limelight two clear ideas: the loss of identity and humanity resulting from oppression; and the concept of the oppressor versus the oppressed. What results is violence, brought about by the oppressor who dehumanizes the oppressed by denying them their rights. He sees them merely as objects that are subject to his guidelines and views their rebellion as violence, yet in retrospect, he is in fact the instigator of the violence. The real evil of dehumanization is that it robs us of not only our humanity, but “is a distortion of the vocation of becoming more fully human.”

Since the identity of people is closely tied with their humanity, oppression, which dehumanizes people, can only result in the oppressed accepting their fate as the oppressed or having a small group of the oppressed feeling stirred up by the oppressor’s actions and breaking away. In order for their rebellion to not lose sight of its ideals, they must be careful not to turn from being the oppressed into oppressors, as their entire environment is of the oppressor-oppressed nature. A revolution is an inescapable outcome, out of which, comes a fear of freedom found in both the oppressor and the oppressed.

“The oppressed are afraid to embrace freedom; the oppressed are afraid of losing the ‘freedom’ to oppress”

The oppressor perceives the oppressed merely are objects to be owned and the oppressed often face the challenge of creating a new identity of their own beyond that which they have been accustomed to. The oppressed must therefore be the creators of this new pedagogy of the oppressed as they are best able to empathize with other fellow oppressed people and are the eye of the hurricane of oppression.

Growing up, we each went through the education system, each country with its own but given the global educational landscape, almost all falling into the pitfalls of seeing the teacher as the depositor and the children as vessels to merely be filled with knowledge, completely oblivious of the knowledge and skills that each child possesses from their environment and which is unique to their character. This system, over time continually rewards those who are easier to fill and see ‘problem children’ in students who seem unable to grasp (memorize, repeat, have ingrained in their minds) knowledge that remains external to them. Our education system separates their consciousness. This spills over to the work place, where creativity is seen as rebellion while following guidelines is seen as being smart, productive, and efficient. “How well people fit the world the oppressors have created, and how little they question it.” Our creativity is robbed from us. What results is a world in which people live but with which they are disconnected from. This system robs students of their innate inventiveness, curiosity and creativity and disassociates world knowledge with their reality.

“Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry.”

This begets the need for a paradigm shift in which we drop the teacher-student role and begin to integrate an open learning platform where both the educator and the students learn from each other, actively engage each other in the learning process –which is a lifelong process and dynamic in nature. The roles of the teacher and student should be easiy interchangeable “for whoever teaches learns in the act of teaching and whoever learns teaches in the act of teaching.” Liberation education consists of being able to think, internalize and then act as opposed to merely taking in information and re-producing it, this way inhibiting critical and creative thinking.

“From the onset, his [the teacher’s] efforts must coincide with those of the students’ to engage in critical thinking and the quest for humanization. His efforts must be imbued with a profound trust in people and their creative power.”

Again there are the outliers, just as they were in the colonial setting, who see the world as something bigger – a place in which they are to identify problems, and be active change makers. With this, the emergence of problem-posing education begins! And is problem- posing education? The ability to unveil reality by allowing educators and students to be consciously aware of the problems and challenges, this way turning them into critical thinkers able to both perceive and tackle challenges. It is based on the innate ability we all posses of being able to truly reflect, inquire, and then act based on creativity and understanding of the world in which we live.

“Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

“A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people, which engaged him in their struggle, than by a thousand actions in their favor without trust.” (Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 60)

The banking model sounds to me like a definition of not just bad teaching, but the worst possible teaching. At the same time, it seems to me that at this point, and perhaps even when this was written, the banking model is both a brilliant summary of the worst of education and at the same time a straw man, easy to take down for its soul crushing industrial qualities? That is, the industrial image of education, and the banking model is a better description, but it amounts to the same thing, was a perfect metaphor for 19th century public education, and in some ways becomes more perfect as a descriptor of some parts of the high-stakes testing, NCLB world of public education in the US. But for those of us who teach as schools that are no way near the extreme version of the banking model as Freire sets it out, what are we left with to take away and reflect on our own practice, our own privilege in the system, and our own possible role as oppressors or at least colluding with the oppressors?   The description (begging of chapter 2) of the banking concept of education, strikes me as a characterization of the very worst in American education, the version no one wants, and many of us do not have to live, as students or as teachers.  While this very worst version does exist, and perhaps parts of it exist in almost every school, and in these versions it is a soul-crushing, anti-democratic, anti-revolutionary, dehumanizing experience, there are many better educational situations (for example good progressive schools), and many educational systems (private and public) that strive to blend some of the content cramming with more dialectical models (although they would never use that word), but these better versions are not sufficiently revolutionary and dialectic to lead to liberation.  So as the teacher at one of these places, doing good work, focused on content and critical thinking, working to provide students authentic educational experiences that make them aware, compassionate, and engaged, where am I to put the theoretical analysis? As a reader who knows of these better places, teaches in them, loves them, and believes that the inquiry, habits of mind, and critical thinking that come from these places alongside the good SAT scores and the college admissions letters, are of real human value, can I too easily dismiss this argument?  I know that my classroom and my teaching, and the classrooms and teaching of so many good teachers, do not match the banking model as described, but I am  left with a nagging suspicion that I am deluding myself.

As I read chapter 2, I wondered, as we so often do in faculty meetings and hall-way discussions, about the importance of particular subject area content, and the balance between authentic, project-based (and problem-based) learning opportunities and the need for students to know what the Constitution says and were in history the idea of liberty comes from in our modern world.

And I finally found that reference to content I was looking for, but it left me no closer to any sense of ease in my troubled thinking about radical humanist educational practice.

“The students – no longer docile listeners – are now critical co-investigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and re-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.” (page 81)

So in the context of a dialectical educational approach, there it is, “the material” hanging in the middle of the sentence without any more explanation of what that might be, or how it could be arrived at in a way consistent with radical notion of a new relationship between student and teacher.

How can the teacher, who is not above her students, who trusts them as she trusts humanity, and who does not set herself up as superior, but only as the one in the room with experience in a particular skill, such as using software to create 3D models, or performing algebraic functions, asking questions of a historic document, or congregating Latin verbs, teach, without setting herself up for being criticized for using her power for oppression?

The list of characteristics of the banking model on page 73 plays into this problem of the reader from a good school, trying hard, and recognizing at every corner the types of compromises made in the school day. If I am sure that my teaching does not fit into the list of things from a to j that characterize the banking model, then am I off the hook? I don’t think so. The challenge of the radical critique is blunted by this straw man. So where does that leave us?

I don’t have an answer. I want to teach how to think, not what to think.

But I do have another question about how to fit the idea of a revolutionary pedagogy into a world where the influences that set opinions for people increasingly come from outside the home and the school.

To what extent today does the indoctrination of the ruling class, the mental part of the oppression, today happen in popular culture rather than education? That is to say, can revolutionary educational practice be enough to make up for the impressions formed by advertising, TV, movies, etc.? The rude critical tone of comments on YouTube, the endless fascination with entertainment options that distract and never challenge, and the constant division of even news sources into avenues to confirm pre-existing beliefs, rather than challenge them, all serve, perhaps more powerfully than education ever could have, to indoctrinate people into a numbing belief in the inability of anything to change.

In this world of 6 second cat videos, where is the place for revolutionary education? Freire says, “Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings who are authentic only wen engaged in inquiry and creative transformation.” (page 84)

If we get there, and that is  a big if, will it all be undone by 6 seconds of a cat falling off a table? I don’t want to be that cynical, but sometime I feel that way. When I do, I go back into the classroom and think about how to do my job better, rather than all the forces that are acting against us.

Both Papert and Freire truly resonate with much of what I find myself thinking and talking about when I think about my own philosophy of teaching; it has been refreshing to read both of these reflections on education and think about how they reflect my own thoughts and practices.

The video that Susanna shared also showed this intersection, although I find it interesting that even those who deeply believe that lecturing should not be the core of our teaching still end up giving “speeches” to each other to share their points.

We still use the banking model of education as our dominant model – with teachers depositing knowledge in a students’ mind.  Papert asked us to think about who defines what constitutes a discipline, in other words, what is Physics and how is it taught.  He posited that we continue to teach (even 30 years later) the same Physics courses that were developed around the technology of paper and pencil which are focused on solving word problems and carrying out labs with already identified answers.  Instead, he challenges us to reimagine our disciplines and what students can now do because of new technology so that students both lead the vision of what they are studying and so that they will deeply understand what they are learning.  Too many students are learning algorithms and skills without understanding the true meaning of what they are learning because that learning is decontextualized.  Contextualized student driven learning will be the driver for students to understand the math that surrounds us.

I read Freire in my teacher education program, but it took on a much deeper meaning now that I have been a teacher for many years; I have worked with low-income students for over ten years but I still have questions about how this looks in my own school setting.  As a part of my credentialing program, we completed a “Funds of Knowledge” project which asked us to interview/observe/visit a student and their family to learn more about their own knowledge of the world and learn to see the assets they have.  Clearly this project was created to help us to reject the deficit model that many people have about the poor; in addition, the project was intended to help us to see that our students and families had resources that related to our content.  For me, the connection to the humanities and the more philosophical and political issues Freire discusses was clear, but what about Algebra II and Physics?

After visiting and talking with my student and his family, it was clear that they had a strong fund of knowledge, that education was extremely important to them, and that the deficit model was indeed faulty.  I believe now, as I did then, that all of my students can learn Physics and in general my classes are taught in a way that encourages collaboration, critical thinking, and conceptual understanding.  Students learn by doing and learn through understanding not memorization or algorithm.  But the family that I visited did not know too much about Physics and I would guess that if asked (for example), they would have had Aristotelean models of motion, not Newtonian models and that without my  guidance their son would not have come to understand the Newtonian model of motion.  So, my question is, how do areas of study like Physics and Algebra II fit into a Pedagogy of the Oppressed? My student had a strong knowledge of the world around him, but he would not have learned about much about Physics without my guidance – even if that guidance is minimal and values my student’s own construction of knowledge rather than just transmitting it.

In Freire’s description of a problem-posing education he states that students and teachers must learn from each other.  It is through activities like open-ended design and making where I have seen this happen most clearly.  With 25+ students in a class pursuing different projects with different areas of focus, it isn’t long before they exceed my understanding in many areas and I start to learn from them.  In addition, these projects drive them to pursue understandings of more formalized knowledge (e.g. engineering, math, physics) so that they can better design their next project or so they can explain what they are doing to others.

“For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, men cannot truly be human.  Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restles, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry men pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.”

Finally, Freire says that “Liberation is a praxis” and this makes me think about how we can push our students to truly “[reflect] upon their world in order to transform it”.  How can students use what they have learned to bring about changes to our society to lessen oppression?  In today’s context it seems that part of changing that equation is about technology; but it isn’t just about access to technology, it is about who controls the technology.  The activities that we are embarking on with our students allow them to own their technology and use it to level the playing field.  In my own microcosm, thinking back to the funds of knowledge project, I think that I also need to do a better job of pulling parents into our program.  So much of what we do in our design and making program plays into strengths that our families have as well as areas that they would be interested in learning more about if opportunities were presented to them.