For Project 1, I have asked you to write an education narrative. One guideline in the assignment is to connect one or two of our course readings–our mentor texts–with what you’re writing about your experience with education.
Choose one passage from our readings, include it in a comment below, and provide the author and title (tip: you can probably copy and paste the passage from the digital copy of the reading). Then in a paragraph below your quoted passage, respond to the passage: what is it saying, and how does it connect to what you’re thinking about writing in Project 1?
If you haven’t figured out what you’re writing about in Project 1, that’s fine–you can choose a passage that stands out to you and that might help you think about what matters to you, what story you want to tell, how it helps you think about your education.
(This is a double-entry journal!)
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.
Hereās 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 couldnāt succeed in memorizing what I needed toāsocial studies classes were like this for me, even though when done well, they shouldnāt 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 creationābut I know that sometimes that doesnāt happen. I hope students this semester will join me to make this challenging and rewarding critical co-investigation possible.