Discussion Post #3: Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Freirian Approach to Education

              In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire lays out his concepts and elements of what is considered the transformative approach to education. In his method, he describes the established education system as a banking system of education. In this model, educators are the sole point of authority in the classroom, dispensing information to passive students who must “bank” or store the information. This is the system I’m most familiar with. Throughout my education, I occasionally encountered teaching styles that attempted to subvert the passivity of students by trying to push us into being more active. However, these teachers tended to be the exceptions rather than the norm, and much of the burden of the class instruction and students’ success relied on what the teacher did or did not do.  I did not question this teacher-centric teaching style until a one-on-one conference with an English professor in my Junior year of undergraduate study. In that meeting, the professor was not directive in her feedback on my project and encouraged me to become self-directed (in the sense of taking in upon myself to go beyond the given texts of the course). While this was not quite the dialogic approach that Freire recommends, this was a crystallizing event for my own understanding that students can and should have input in their own education. Since reading this book two years ago, I have tried to incorporate a dialogic approach in my tutoring, and in my small group CATW grammar workshop, I attempt to inject information about students’ social reality. While I haven’t quite managed to the successfully implement praxis (as far as I know,) I hope by the discussing the politics of language while so teaching grammar I can get my students to reflect critically upon the the power dynamics of SAE and students' home language.