Memorization is not teaching

The passage that stood out to me the most in Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire was, “It is not surprising that the banking concept of education regards men as adaptable, manageable beings. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.”

The reason why this passage stood out so much was because I felt like I was not properly prepared by my high school teachers into entering college. Don’t get me wrong, I still believe I had a good education growing up 30 minutes outside the nation’s capital, but there were many key skills that I was never taught and had a steep learning curve my first year in college. First off, Virginia public schools are all about Standard of Learning (SOL) assessments. This forces our educators to stick to a set curriculum and impose memorization skills rather than critical thinking skills. When it came time for me apply my thoughts in writing my first college essay, I was not the best at articulating my thoughts, and it did not help that I was more so a math and science person; I failed miserably. Furthermore, the type of memorization training I had in high school initially hindered my engineering education. I was so used to memorizing equations and how to solve math problems that when I was faced with an engineering question that required me to apply those skills, I did not know where to start. Of course, I soon adapted to the way teaching should have been done during my high school career, but I also saw a lot of my peers struggle and ultimately quit engineering programs to switch to less vigorous disciplines or drop out of college all together. We must change our philosophy on teaching methods in order to create a generation that is more so critical to solving complicated worldly problems that do not have direct black or white solutions.

Curiosity requires moral courage

This week’s readings on critical pedagogy and the different interactions between students and teachers reminded me of an article by Don Peppers titled “Curiosity is an Act of Rebellion“. Like Paulo Freire, he also argues for the importance of curiosity as a moral obligation. Engagement can only be achieved through independence of the mind, not passive reception of information. It seems like the standard of education favors the authoritarian and paternalistic models where everything flows in a unidirectional manner from the top of the pyramid of power, down to everyone else below. And as Freire once stated: “Education as the exercise of domination stimulates the credulity of students, with the ideological intent (often not perceived by educators) of indoctrinating them to adapt to the world of oppression.” These models are kept in place by discouraging curiosity which, as an act of rebellion, can often involve the critique and questioning of the status quo.

“… shake the certainty of teachers…” I think this is at the root of the problem. As a society, we have placed so much pressure on always getting things right, avoiding “failure”, or avoiding being wrong, that we perpetuate this fear by trying to prevent any form of dissent or disagreement. Despite all the data pointing to the great value in disagreement as a means to innovation and progress, somehow most areas across the political, religious, and scientific platforms still opt for a model of dominance at their core. Maybe a way to move past all this is by celebrating the “failures” and cultivating humility. In Freire’s words “only through communication can human life hold meaning” and “dialogue cannot exist without humility”.

Critical Pedagogy

Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed discusses the “The Banking Concept of Education” and the negative consequences of this system.  The concept of banking is pretty simple the teachers are the depositors of knowledge and the students are the depositories. Through this system students just receive, file and store these “knowledge deposits.”  They don’t really think about what they are being taught they are just memorizing the information that they are given . I found this to be an interesting and well thought out way to describe the lack of critical thinking in the educational system. What I took away from this was that in order for students to really gain something from there education there needs to be more of a dialog between the students and the teachers. This is something that has come up in class before, education is not a one-way street where teachers just throw knowledge out for the students to memorize; it is important that students really think critically about what they are learning and question things that are unclear or don’t make sense to them.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) in The Critical Pedagogy Primer (2004) discusses what it means to be an educator according to Freire. Educators are “learned scholars, community researchers, moral agents, philosophers, cultural workers, and political insurgents. One thing that I found very interesting is that Freire said that “teaching is a political act” and argued that educators should embrace this fact.  He believed that teachers should “position social, cultural, economic, political and philosophical critiques of dominant power at the heart of the curriculum.” While I think it is important that educators not push their own political agenda on their students, I think that teachers should provide students with appropriate information and allow them the opportunity to think critically about their own situations and how they can work to better their own lives.


Teach Less

Before reading the article by Paulo Freire (http://faculty.webster.edu/corbetre/philosophy/education/freire/freire-2.html), I thought a good teacher should teach as much knowledge as he/she can to the students. But I neglected a very important fact that the success of a teaching process not only depends on the teacher’s input but also on the student’s acceptance of the knowledge. Students are not bank account, onto which you can deposit as much money as you want. Students are people who have different background and cognition of the world. So they probably cannot accept (really understand) all the knowledge taught by the teachers.

Effective teaching methodology should treat students as humans not objectives that can memorize all the knowledge given by the teachers. Therefore, the teachers need to communicate frequently with the students and know how they reflect on the contents taught in class. It is important to encourage the students to discuss in class and talk about their ideas on the subjects. This can inspire critical thinking not only for the students but also for the teachers. The teachers should cultivate an atmosphere that the students want to play an active role in class, i.e., they are willing to express their opinions and interact with the others. By this means, the unidirectional teaching-learning process will be transformed into bidirectional teaching-learning process where both the students and teachers teach and learn at the same time.

The bidirectional teaching and learning process not only frees the students from memorizing so much knowledge but also frees the teachers from preparing so many materials. More time can be saved for discussion. The discussion may generate new ideas and questions, thus the learning will not be limited within the teaching materials. Based on the discussions, the teacher can adjust the teaching materials for next class. I think it will be more effective than the traditional lecture-only classes. Overall, what I learned from the article is that a good teacher should teach less and learn more from their students.


What is the opposite of war?

Question: What is the opposite of war?

Answer: …?

Before you continue to read this post, and for once it’ll be rather short (comparatively, but not by much), take a few moments to answer the above question. While I will be, quickly, linking what I am saying to Freire’s work and thoughts, although I will be assuming relative familiarity with Freire’s problem-posing model and not explaining it, my set-up is going to be non-traditional. In fact, I am going to be pulling from Philip Hallie’s “From Cruelty to Goodness“. Hallie is a scholar who investigated the cruelties of the Holocaust and worked to answer the question I posed to all of us earlier. Given the recent events here at Tech against our Jewish community, it is an answer that I think salient for the critical pedagogy we are investigating this week.

Peace

When folks are asked to name what the opposite of war is, many (I include myself in this number) will initially answer “peace”. Likewise, if I had asked a question about the opposite of harm/pain, many would have initially said “relief from pain” or something of that sort.

Peace, and relief from pain, are not the opposite of war or pain; they are their absence. For Hallie, they are not sufficient for overcoming decades and, sometimes, centuries of social conditioning and structured oppression. That is a systems claim, but I see little reason for it to not apply to the classrooms level as well. As such, I would like to posit that we need to do more than remove negative elements in our classrooms. If we ever want to practice a critical pedagogy of the sort Freire posits, a pedagogy that necessitates the destruction of a power differential, we need to have something positive as opposed to neutral in our praxis.

Hospitality and Restoration

For some of the learners in our classrooms, and for some of us in class, there are live harms. There are historical and unmediated instantiations of cruelty and maimed dignity that are brought into the classroom as invisible knapsacks not of privilege, but of oppression, degradation, humiliation, and isolation. Under a neutral model, such as a peace model, these aren’t addressed and in being ignored can continue to impact the experiences of those in the classroom. We can’t, with Freire’s model, afford to ignore these past and live harms. We must address them and combat their reification in the classroom.

As facilitators in our classrooms, a positive possibility for addressing these harms is framed as hospitality. For Hallie, hospitality is “…unsentimental efficacious love” that ends cruel power relationships, and in my view transforms relationships, while seeking to heal those who have been harmed.

To contextualize this a bit more, hospitality is a response to oppression/institutionalized cruelties and these cruelties are captures by four aspects. The first is that the cruelty is substantial and maims dignity. [1] Second, that it is pervasive or total insofar as those living under the oppression cannot find respite from those assaults on their dignity. [2] The third is that it involves a power differential. [3] Last, it operates just outside of awareness and takes a constant effort to address. [4]

This persistence, resilience even, in the face of a historical banking method is necessary for instantiating a radically different pedagogy that, in many ways, is not of our own creating (more on this shortly). Our students have been impeded in a model, for the most part, that tells them over and over again that they are not capable of original thought, that they don’t have anything to offer, and that they are not worthy of our attention or deference. This is a sort of cruelty in its own way, and hospitality is a way of combating it.

In combating it, the facilitator gives deference to those whom they, for lack of a better term, serve. They ask “what do you need from me” and “how can we work together to make sure your needs are met”. I know this may seem odd, and even in liberatory thought deference and “terms” conflicts are readily contested, but I don’t see how Freire’s model can work any other way.

It is a risk, yes, and a risk that we have been systematically incentivized to not take. But what must we believe about those we work with to not be willing to cede power? What must we fear to not be willing to be vulnerable? And who benefits from our continued refusal to do these things?

Hospitality, as required by the model, does not set one person or group above the other and does not assume that one holds power over the other in the conventional sense of the term. Rather, it frames the actors as equals, as mutual laborers in a project of their creation, and stands opposed to the many paradigms of instruction that we have currently in the academy.

It helps create a possibility for the construction and production of knowledge that Freire was looking for. [5]

“Of” NOT “For”

For the critical pedagogy we are investigating, we are looking at a shift in model; we are looking at a student and learner centered model; we are looking at a pedagogy OF the oppressed.

The “of” is very important. This is not a pedagogy that is “for” the oppressed. It is not a pedagogy that is created, formed, laid out, and then applied “to” the oppressed. It is created by and on the terms of the oppressed and never otherwise. Perhaps this is why, in the introduction of his book, we find that a 16-year old boy and his “semiliterate” mother were able to understand the book and its message when the “academics” could not. The book was “of” them, not “for” the academics. [6]

In our classrooms, specifically in those spaces where we hold power granted by a system, this means a pedagogy that is ultimately only ever legitimated by the students and learners is stems from. It is not something we apply to them, though there are facilitation skills and elements of vulnerability imbedded in creating a classroom environment such that they can collaborate in the labor of making, and unmaking, the pedagogy by which they learn; a pedagogy that makes and unmakes them just as it makes and unmakes the facilitator in remarkable and, often, unimaginable ways. This is where hospitality comes into play since, without hospitality, we risk reifying historical power dynamics within the classroom or failing to account for the histories and lived experiences our students bring with them into the classroom.

Outside of that space, in the places where we no longer hold power, though for some of us those spaces are few and far between, there is an opportunity for our own pedagogy to emerge. A pedagogy which, in fact, can lead to the liberation of the oppressed and their oppressors alike. To tie this back to Hallie, hospitality restores humanity to someone else, or to a group of “other” people, but also restores the humanity of the practitioner.

For Freire, only the oppressed can liberate the oppressors. For Hallie, only the maimed can ultimately restore their maimer. For both the liberation of both is bound together.

For us in this classroom, and in our future classrooms should we answer Freire’s class, we will make it and it will make us in a continuous process of labor and relation.

It is a pedagogy of us and it is ours just so long as we are for one another.


[1] “Cruelty involves the maiming of a person’s dignity and the crushing of a person’s self-respect” (p.23)

[2] p. 24

[3] pp. 24-25

[4] “It is the viewpoint of the victim that is authoritative” (p.25) This requires that someone who has been taught how to not listen to the oppressed will have to actively work to listen to their stories.

[5] see p. 10 (by pdf page demarcation) in Pedagogy of Freedom.

[6] see pp.22-23 in Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Critical Pedagogy

What does Freire’s approach to teaching and learning emphasize and why?
Freire’s approach emphasizes the importance of dialog between teachers and students where both are learning and developing as opposed to the teacher dumping information on the students. Additionally, he poses the need for “Problem-posing” education, an education where the problems of human beings and their relations with the world are brought into question. Instead of using a what he refers to as a traditional “Banking” education where students are empty bins that teachers fill with information.

How does Freire define dialogic engagement?
Freire strongly believes that dialogue is not present when the Banking method is used where teachers’ poor information into the students’ bins in hopes that some amount of the information is retained so that the students can pass the exams and get through the class. What does Freire think should happen when dialogue in the classroom occurs? He thinks that the terms “teacher-of-the-students” and “students-of-the-teacher” will not exist and will instead be replaced with the terms “teacher-student” and “students-teacher”. Trying to digest this in my own words… It sounds that when dialogic engagement occurs there will no long be a teacher that teaches students, but instead students that become teachers and a teacher that becomes a student. Both the teacher and the students will learn and grow all the while the teacher is able to direct the dialogue and ‘add fuel to the fire’ to keep the dialogue going and to help educate the students.

What would a critical pedagogical praxis look like in your disciple?
I feel that a large majority of engineering courses follow the “banking” education format almost exactly. Therefore, I have become so use to this educational format that it is hard for me to envision a pedagogical praxis in engineering. BUT, I’m going to try and explain what I envision when I think of critical pedagogy in a ME classroom. So, what would a critical pedagogical praxis look like in mechanical engineering? I envision a class where the professor doesn’t come in with a prepared PowerPoint presentation, but instead has little details written down that he wants to make sure to cover during class (maybe something like equations, illustrations, example problems, etc.). Therefore, the professor can guide the discussion in the necessary route, but still allow the students to contribute and add to the discussion.

What is the difference, for Freire, between being “authority” vs. being “authoritarian”?
Teachers sometimes let their professional authority get in the way of their teaching. When this type of thing happens, it opposes the freedom of the students. This type of teaching would fall under authoritarian because it is strict and at the expense of the educational freedom of the students. When a teacher instead steps back and uses authority he/she is taking more of a director position. They do not oppose the freedom of the students but ensure that proper dialogue is carried out and that arguments based on “authority” are not occurring.

“No, I don’t think that is necessary”

Our readings about the sociocultural role of schooling makes me think about who decides who gets to go to college.

In community college, open enrollment makes higher education available to almost everyone, at least in theory. Inadequate preparation from grade school can be overcome, to some extent. In a community college engineering program, students typically begin their math with intermediate algebra. An extra year of math before Calculus I allows students who were not on the engineering track in high school to catch up. This was not always the case, and even now, it’s not a perfect solution.

Here’s my story. In the sixth grade, I transferred to public school. Coming from outside the public school system, my placement was determined by testing, and I was assigned to “6-1,” the top academically ranked sixth-grade class. The other nine sixth-grade classes were numbered “6-2” through “6-10,” in descending order of academic ranking from college-bound to remedial instruction.

The middle school had three or four elementary feeder schools. That’s why I was surprised and confused to find that every member of my “6-1” class, except me, not only already knew one another, but had been in the same fifth grade class together. I also found it odd that every student in our class was white. Through three years of middle school, there was some limited mixing between the top two classes. Halfway through the seventh grade, the two top math classes re-mixed, with one group preparing for 8th grade algebra and the other taking regular 8th grade math. The former would be favorably positioned for 12th grade calculus. Students who missed 8th grade algebra could catch up to the calculus class by doubling up on 10th grade math. A few students from the original “6-1” dropped down to lower ranked placements, but no students from “6-3” or below ever rose to the upper academic rankings.

Many years later, it dawned on me that “6-1” was simply the top fifth grade class from the whitest elementary feeder school selected wholesale, without evidence to support placement. The “6-2” class came from the largely Hispanic elementary school, which would have been my school had I attended public school in fifth grade.

There were many black students at my middle school, probably a majority of the school, but almost none were in the college-bound classes. I did not take classes with black students until high school. Even then, with only one public high school in a racially diverse community, black students were a small minority in the college-bound classes.

At that time, community college was not a realistic path for engineering students. To be accepted into an engineering program, one needed to at least be ready for Calculus I as a college freshman. This means that the person or policy responsible for selecting “6-1” from the most privileged effectively chose who would and who would not have a chance to become an engineer seven years before those students finished high school.

Thirty years later, I advocated for my son to be in the algebra-bound seventh grade math class, to no avail. There was no justification for my son’s placement on the non-algebra track except convenience for school administration, apparently. I was told that the first week of school was “too busy” a time to reconsider placements, then in the second week, it was “too late to change.” My son got a lucky break by getting transferred to a small special education school, where his placements were determined by testing. Halfway through the 8th grade, my son was told that he should rightly be placed in algebra, and he was given an opportunity to join an online class and complete the course in half a year, which he did. He did not become an engineer, but he had the opportunity to do so, and more importantly, his school helped instill in him an attitude and expectation that he could achieve academic success, which he did in high school and college. Unfortunately, the hundreds of students in the mainstream middle school did not all have this advantage.

The most shocking example of “power related dynamics” that “undermine social mobility” (as described in Critical Pedagogy in School) happened to me in high school. My parents went through the process of requesting my high school principal for permission for me to enroll in a single elective course at the community college in summer school, just to give me something to do. The principal’s response: “No, I don’t think that is necessary.” Obviously to me, the principal was threatened by the idea that I was not getting all the education I needed from public school and felt it necessary to supplement. At the time, I did not actually know what engineering was or that I should want to study it. The community college course that my parents suggested for me would have exposed me to engineering. So it was not really “elective” but an important part of my development. I am fortunate that I happened to find engineering another way, in time to matriculate into a university engineering program upon high school graduation.

From my perspective, it appears that little has changed in public schools since my school days. We in higher education are left to correct deficiencies through catch-up programs in community colleges, for a price which is largely borne by the students. Remedial classes tend to have heavy billable hours and may not get the same financial aid coverage as regular academic courses. The presence of these courses on the transcript may not be well regarded by the transfer schools that engineering students must get accepted into to become graduate engineers. It’s no wonder that the engineering profession has suffered from the same lack of diversity for decades. Selection, or non-selection, of who gets to go to college is built into the primary education system, and students are potentially crippled by arbitrary decisions made by others years before. They may never realize the impact upon their own lives; being unaware is part of the lack of agency promoted by the system.

For more information:
Critical Pedagogy in School. (2005). Critical Pedagogy Primer, 97-114.

Student as Subject, Student as Object–Take 2*

Middle-class parents are insatiable in their appetite for confirmation that they are doing a good job. (This may be a phenomenon which crosses class boundaries, but because I have no experience outside my own middle-class life, I refrain from a wider claim.) The fuel in those helicopters is anxiety. Where do parents look for evidence to confirm their self- worth? To their children’s performance—in sports, in school, in the arts, in entrepreneurship. For this essay, I will concentrate on school performance because it relates to the nature of schooling and Paolo Friere’s pedagogy and, in my experience, is the most acceptable visible measure of success or failure in the middle-class parent community. I know that Friere writes about the moral obligation of education to educate the oppressed such that they will be empowered to work against oppression and injustice. I do not envision most middle-class children being greatly oppressed in my society. They inherit a certain level of power from their middle-class parents. However, I am a scientist and an educator, not a philosopher. I do not have the tools to dig into Friere at a deep level. Therefore, I will reflect on how his writings relate to the world I know.

As a teacher and a parent, I have participated in many discussions of parent worth and child success. What does it mean to be successful in school? For most parents, this means earning A’s. A-student = A-parent. (High test scores and prestigious college are also acceptable markers of success, but only if they are in addition to high grades.) There is little thought for the lasting meaning of education. For me, the lasting meaning of education is in the knowledge you take with you, the ways of thinking about the world that you develop from that knowledge, the understanding that there are multiple ways in which you can understand the world. True education enables you to don different models of understanding to solve different problems. For Friere, education which neglects to develop “epistemological curiosity”—a well-developed method for learning and communicating more about a topic through critical questioning, thinking and speaking– is no education at all. (This picture is from the blog Mom Stories** in which a parent is boasting about her daughter’s kindergarten report card. Yes,kindergarten!)

This parent/student/cultural focus on making A’s has contributed to a school subculture that fails to value critical thinking or curiosity—what I call a conservative education. In most classes, curiosity is not rewarded with good grades although in some it is rewarded with engagement. I have developed a vocabulary for this. I call students who make good grades “good students” and students who love to learn “curious”. One would hope that curiosity is a requisite skill for being a good student, but it is not. Being good at school may not require curiosity at all. Sadly, good students are not always curious and sometimes do not even recognize the value of curiosity. Yet, parents are happy and colleges are happy to accept and promote good students. Tragically, there are practicing educators for whom the same is true. These are the educators who answer curious questions with, ”That is not on our syllabus” or “We don’t have time for that.” They fail to recognize that teaching students how to learn and that learning is not dead are much more important than teaching them a list of facts or procedures. They are either not interested in or not able to open themselves to the possibility of their own evolution through teaching. They fail to recognize the situations in which their students know more than they do. They fail to ask what lasting effects their interactions have on their student’s lives. To be fair, most educators probably lapse into these traits occasionally, but do not display them habitually.

Having no recollection of reading Friere in the past, I was surprised to find how, at least in my superficial understanding, I agree with him. For Friere, education is a social interaction between teacher-student and students-teachers with trust as an integral piece. While this practice requires critical skepticism of one’s own understanding, it does not advocate for teachers to simply let students learn on their own. “Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught.” Educators (teacher-students) promote learner’s curiosity while teaching them how to learn—how to frame questions and communicate and support answers. Students-teachers (and teacher-students) construct and reconstruct ideas that are new to them. While teachers have authority due to their understanding of the dominant syntax of the subject, they are not authoritarian. They value their students’ experiences and voices through which they continually learn to recreate their own knowledge of the world.

 

How does this relate back to parents? I believe in educating communities about the value of a liberal education. This is the kind of education in which students and teachers practice thinking critically about knowledge, how that knowledge relates to their world, and how knowledge can empower them to recognize and (if they choose) work against injustice. It is through dialogue with parents, students, and colleagues that the possibility of a reversal of values in which learning is valued over grades can be realized.

 

*Last semester I wrote a blog post about college mission statements titled: “Student as Subject, Student as Object”.

**https://blogs.babycenter.com/mom_stories/rewards-for-good-report-cards/

Public Education: Opportunity or Oppression?

This week’s discussion on Critical Pedagogy comes at a very tumultuous time — the election of a new President and his appointed governmental  leaders means significant changes are upon us. The American Education System is one of the first sectors facing serious reform. Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos, looks to overhaul the current public education system by shifting to a more privatized system. Devos reform plan is being met with plenty of opposition from politicians, teachers, and parents alike despite evidence that many public schools are failing and Federal attempts to improve them have yielded no meaningful success. Now, I’m not going to sit here and tell you Devos’s plan is will completely fix all the problems with our education system, but I want to look at the situation with regards to critical pedagogy and how the American Education System came to be in its current state.

Critical pedagogy has been defined as a philosophy of education (and social movement) that has developed and applied concepts of critical theory and related traditions to the filed of education. Critical pedagogy advocates view teaching as inherently political, rejecting the neutrality of knowledge, and believe issues of social justice and democracy are related to the teaching/learning process. The concept of critical pedagogy can be traced back to Paulo Freire’s best-known 1968 work, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in which Freire provides a detailed Marxist class analysis in his exploration of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as it pertains to education.

Let’s take a quick look at the American Education System. Government-supported and free public schools for all began to be established after the American Revolution. However education was optional and mostly offered at private local institutions or performed at home. This meant that education was not standardized nor was quality education available to everyone. In 1852, Massachusetts was the first U.S. state to pass a contemporary universal public education law requiring every town to create and operate a grammar school. Fines were imposed on parents who did not send their children to school, and the government took the power to take children away from their parents and apprentice them to others if government officials decided that the parents were “unfit to have the children educated properly”. Laws requiring compulsory education spread and now, virtually all states have mandates for when children must begin school and how old they must be before dropping out. Compulsory education laws require children to attend a public or state-accredited private school for a certain period of time with certain exceptions, most notably homeschooling.

Now that we’ve gotten some of the important background information out of the way, let’s discuss how America’s compulsory education laws have created this colonizer-colonized relationship Freire outlines in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. By mandating that all children be educated, the Federal government was now responsible for providing a national educational system that was accessible to everyone. This meant that they now have control over the quality and type of content being disseminated to students. Though the public education system was meant to provide everyone with the same educational opportunities, it has furthur exacerbated the educational gap between people of different racial and socio-economic backgrounds.

The is a growing body of evidence showing that the U.S. public education system does not provide the same quality of education to all students. Additionally, similar research shows that U.S. student academic achievement is falling behind that of other countries.  Much of this is attributed to the poor quality of education provided by the public school system. Now, there are many quality public schools that provide high-quality education but, unfortunately, they are normally found in areas of economic prosperity. Areas of economic disparity, arguably areas where quality education is most desperately needed,  tend to have poor public school systems whose students often fail to meet Federally set academic standards. A factor that furthers this issue is the fact citizens are required to pay taxes supporting the local public schools. For low-income citizens, this means the portion of their income that could have been spent on sending their children to a private or charter school is forcibly invested in public schools. By forcing parents to send their students to school, as well as pay taxes to local public schools, the Federal government is essentially dictating how certain populations will be educated. In the case of those living in low-income areas, they are forced to send their children to the affordable, yet poorer quality, public schools instead of sending them to private or charter schools that may offer a better educational experience.

As it stands, it appears the American Educational System promotes this “colonizer-colonized” relationship, outlined by Freire, which oppresses students via banking education. If we are to free students from this oppression with respect to critical pedagogy, maybe Devos’s reform plan holds some promise? By expanding the options available to families seeking a better education for their kids, parents will have the opportunity send their children to schools offering the best education. Ideally, this will create competition among schools, encouraging them to improve the quality of education they offer. It doesn’t necessarily force students out of public schools, but stimulates the schools to improve while at the same time giving families options if they don’t. It really raises the question on whether continued support of public schools creates opportunity or fosters oppression.


Overly critical of ‘different’?

I am so glad that I ain’t the only one who had an issue with plagiarism in America. And I am exceedingly glad that Kinchloe is American. I vividly recollect the expression on a teaching assistant’s face in my first semester here as a Master’s student. She was trying to tell me that the essay she had reviewed was too good to be something I could come up with on my own. She told me that plagiarism was a serious offense in America and that she was doing me a favor by giving me half the marks for that work and to make this my final plagiarized work before she reports me. I just looked at her, unable to find meaning in what she had said and too surprised to form words to respond.

I had only just come to the country and I was trying to build my ego up after realizing that being the best student in my English class does not necessarily mean that Americans will hear me when I speak. I had become a shell of my usual chirpy self and couldn’t participate in class discussions. To me, that meant, I would have to do my assignments well which included making sure my essays were on point. So imagine my shock when the teaching assistant thought me incapable of writing that essay. Hey, did I say I was the best English student in my class?

This brings me to Kinchloe’s inference to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital. I definitely identify with this sentence ‘In the same way that money is a form of “economic capital,” membership in the dominant culture affords individuals ways of knowing, acting, and being (cultural capital) that can be “cashed in” in order to get ahead in the lived world.’ When I was in my country, I will usually be the first to raise my hands to share my opinions. I don’t know whether this changed as I became older or it is because I am uncomfortable to share my opinion here in an accent. The former might be so if I behaved in a similar way when I go to my country but I don’t. I actually talk more then and act vastly different from when I am here. Not fully understanding the codes of the dominant cultural capital, definitely has an effect on how I talk and act here.

As teachers, I think it is important to key in on those that might be marginalized in any way, and try to be inclusive of them in the classroom. If care is not taken, this might lead to picking on these students. So, it takes considerable effort and creative thinking to do that. I hope I am able to achieve that feat with time.

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