This week, you have a choice of what to read from among these texts that talk about education. I’ve gathered them from colleagues and from other versions of this course I taught in FYLCs with COMD (Communication Design), ARCH (Architecture/Architectural Technology), and HMGT (Hospitality Management). I don’t know that all can be called education narratives exactly–two are actually interviews, so they include narrative answers but don’t have the typical format of an education narrative. But all can help you think about your own education experiences, in school and in life.
Since not everyone is reading the same text, let’s help each other out while helping ourselves. Choose a passage that stands out from the education narrative and include it in a comment. In the same comment, say what stands out about it, and connect it to your own experience or say how it contradicts your experience, or a little of both. This will help you think about a passage to include in your education narrative (that’s one of the requirements of Project #1), and will also help classmates figure out if they want to read the text you’re writing about.
This is a type of Double-Entry Reading Journal (or triple-entry), like I asked you to write for the Malcolm X and Frederick Douglass readings.
I’ll get us started!
One passage that stands out to me comes early in Olivarezās essay. He writes āI attended public schools in a working class south suburb of Chicago called Calumet City, where teachers taught via the banking model of education: We were empty bank accounts, and it was our teachersā responsibility to deposit facts.ā The idea of education as some kind of banking transaction comes from educator and philosopher Paolo Freire. We can read more of his work on this from his foundational text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, especially Chapter 2. Iām not expecting you to read all of this chapter! But there are many relevant passages so I canāt quote them all. Here are a few important passages to get you into the text, and please reply here with additional passages if you find them helpful.
Here’s Freire explains the problematic banking model:
āEducation thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ābankingā concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the depositsā
Freire terms the opposite of the banking model of education āproblem-posing education,ā and writes this about it:
āthe problem-posing educator constantly reĀforms his reflections in the reflection of the students. The students Āāno longer docile listeners Āāare nowĀĀ critical co-Āinvestigators in dialogue with the teacher. The teacher presents the material to the students for their consideration, and reĀ-considers her earlier considerations as the students express their own.ā
I often think that what I responded to most as a child in school were opportunities to co-create knowledge with my classmates and teachers. I had an excellent memory, but classes that required just memorization were never my best or my favorite, and I often couldn’t succeed in memorizing what I needed to–social studies classes were like this for me, even though when done well, they shouldn’t be just memorization. I enjoyed the opportunities to figure things out with the guidance of others with expertise, rather than being told what to know and storing it in my knowledge bank (=my brain).
As an educator, I strive for this kind of collaboration students in knowledge creation–but I know that sometimes that doesn’t happen. I hope students this semester will join me to make this challenging and rewarding “critical co-investigation” possible.