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… Read more »

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… Read more »

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… Read more »

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… Read more »

“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… Read more »

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… Read more »

Whenever I read Freire I feel inspired. And then I think about the realities of the classroom… How to implement problem posing education so that it is omni-present in the school environment? Is that even something that he proposed and imagined? Is there a place on earth where this is happening? How do they do… Read more »

It’s too easy in a creative work environment, to be overly concerned about the end product.  We may have a vision in our minds of what we would like students to produce and even how they might get there; however, when we predetermine what that project will become by restricting process and regimenting our environment… Read more »

Acting as a studio and lab teacher requires providing not only materials, inspiration, and a problem to tackle, but also a bit of redirecting student desire to focus on the end product. Conversely, the path of a creative thinker can be a non-linear one, resembling alphabet soup more than a direct path from A to… Read more »

Pedagogy of the oppressed is, in my opinion, one of the deepest reflections on education ever.  It is so complete and complex that one can read it again and again and discover new contributions/inspirations every time. The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for the  critical discovery that both oppressed and oppressors are manifestations… Read more »