These essentially are the questions that found their way into the margins of these three works by or on Freire. While they are simple, they have been rolling around my head for a few days now and I think that they are important questions for me to ask myself as I continue on this path of becoming a teacher educator and researcher. I hope they are of use to you, as well - please, pick and choose as you see fit.
1. Freire and hooks advocate a transformative pedagogy, which I tend to agree with. Are there times when as a teacher I am aiming to transmit rather than transform? What about the transmission of my beliefs on human rights and equality in the classroom - is my motivation to "give" my students the knowledge about this or to lead them to come to their own decisions about these topics? What if they decide on something that I do not agree with? Have I failed?
2. How can I, a privileged white woman, get my students (and our future teachers) to see "education as the practice of freedom" when many of them have not come from oppression or who have never seen their own (multiple roles in) oppression? What leads to the shift in consciousness? How can I bring that into my classroom?
3. Can one unknowingly teach with a feminist pedagogy or is consciousness a pre-requisite for true feminist pedagogy?
4. Is Freire's banking model the norm in the university? How would we know?
5. I was struck by the references I saw to performance and authenticity in these readings. Weiler demands that we constantly re-evaluate how we speak so that we can avoid dominance (73). Freire states that "those who authentically commit themselves to the people must re-examine themselves constantly" (60). hooks applies authenticity on page 54. What value is placed on this re-evaluation/examination in the academy? Who holds us accountable for this ongoing process? Is this something that our students should be taught how to do?
Thanks, Kathryn. You've raised some interesting points, here.
For me, points 2 and 5 seem related, perhaps because there's some overlap suggested between the concepts of consciousness and self-evaluation that Freire and Weiler advocate. And I really like that you're questioning whether one can unknowingly teach with a feminist pedagogy as in your third point. I've often asked myself the same question. Here I am teaching for the seventh semester in a row and I'm certain that I've been employing feminist strategies of consciousness-raising in my classrooms since the beginning, but this is the first GWSS course I've had the priviledge of taking since my undergraduate days. Have I been unknowningly teaching with a feminist pedagogy all along, I wonder? I certainly don't have much of a theoretical framework to work with nor do I have a wealth of feminist vocabulary at my disposal (sadly, this isn't much dealt with in the realm of seventeenth-century Spanish art history). When I really stop to reflect on this question, though, I think the answer is no, I haven't been doing this without knowing it; I've had the intent of raising consciousness and engaging with my students (some of whom are now close friends) as humans (not as objects in the Freireian, patriarchal sense) since the first day I stepped into the classroom in an "authoritative" role.
I think the catch is, for me, that I've never felt like an authority figure. This might have something to do with my position as a TA as opposed to a Professor/Instructor, but I think it's more a reflection of my own consciousness/awareness of the fellw humans that filled my classroom and who just happened, through the accident of university course scheduling, to be my students. What a happy accident it was, because I've learned more from my students about myself and the world around us than from some of the more rigorous graduate seminars I've taken in the last four years.
So I'm not sure if this helps answer any of your questions, Kathryn, or if it muddles the situation further. I look forward to hearing what others have to share.
-Melody M. (with only one tatoo)
PS - My apologies for the many parenthetical asides.
I found many interesting avenues for possible discussion for this week’s pedagogical questions. However, the one(s) that resonated with me the most relate to Freire’s concepts of critical reflection (posed by Raechel ) and hooks’ and Freire’s authentic re-evaluation of self (as Kathryn stated in #5). As a teacher of teachers, I have found one of the most difficult skills to teach is the capacity to achieve honest, deep, critical reflection of oneself.
The problem of teaching critical self-reflection, as I see it, is two-fold. The first is that student teachers are new at their profession and are clearly just getting by most of the time. They are more conscious of their own actions from minute to minute and class to class, than they are of their students’ interpretations, understanding, learning, perceptions, and/or education. So, while they can often times reflect on what worked and what didn’t, it’s a rare student who digs deeper to interpret their students perceptions. One of the aspects of my teaching, which I attribute to critical feminist pedagogy (whether I knew it or not to begin with) is to reflect openly with my students on my teaching and how the students interpreted my use of language, my intent for the lesson, their reactions to consciousness-raising etc… The second problem is that the science teachers I’ve worked with seem to either come into the initial licensure program with the capacity to accomplish critical self-reflection, or they don’t.
The first problem seems solvable. Teachers, with more experience and mentoring, can learn to contemplate both their own role in the classroom as well as their students’ interpretations/perceptions. In the science education methods courses, the students are asked to reflect often. They reflect in written assignments, weekly discussion with their mentors and large group discussions. Each assignment and chance for discourse is preceded by a focus question or case study for reflection. As teachers gain more experience in the classroom, talk with other teachers, work with a mentor, and reflect upon lessons daily, they gain the knowledge of the importance of critical self-reflection. I think that Freire might agree that these weekly meetings with teacher-mentors could help student teachers learn the importance of (and process of) critical self-reflection. “Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.” (77)
The second problem, however, seems somewhat insurmountable. In my own experience, learning to be a critical reflective practitioner requires a personal openness to criticism. This can be scary for people. Students don’t want to admit their short-comings to their mentors, after all it might affect their grade. If they start to question themselves, they may not be able to find the answer, or find they’ve been doing something terribly “wrong” all along. After all Weiler, after lauding Paulo Freire, critiques his critical pedagogy for, “Freire’s failure to include the experiences of women or to analyze or even acknowledge the patriarchal grounding of Western thought”. (74) Self-reflection requires practice and openness to be fully accomplished.
Other questions I’ve wrestled with on the matter of educating students about authentic self-reflection include: should I be blunt or compassionate? Should I scribble in red pen on their reflection papers, or speak with them personally about concerns? Should I devalue their thinking or value their thinking no matter how one-sided/oppressive their view might be? Are any of the teachers I’ve worked with more authentic in their self-reflection today than they were when they were students-teachers?
Thank you both for your thoughtful insights and great questions. I look forward to our conversation in class. Barb
This post is in response to Kathryn’s pedagogical question from 9/28 and whether or not there are times when “transmission” is our acceptable or even our goal. Working on my own syllabus and reading others’ has made me think about this a lot more. I do think that my immediate goal is to transmit, but usually as part of a larger commitment to transform. The opposition between the two terms, I’m finding, is sometimes forced when, in practice, they may be very closely linked. Perhaps this can also be thought of as the differences between tactics and strategies?
I absolutely want students to become critical thinkers and engaged, active global citizens. But, one of the reasons I want to teach what I teach is that there is a serious lack of information about sex, gender, sexuality, racism, and the ways that power works. For example, as a TA this semester, I ended up taking time in discussion section to give a mini-history and crash-course about the history of sterilization abuse and the removal of children of color from their parents in the US, and on another occasion about “gay panic” as a criminal defense for murder. In these cases, students’ ability to think about the political and ethical contexts and consequences was severely limited by misinformation, miseducation, literal ignorance and the disavowal of racial and sexual privilege.
Although I am tempted to say that in the long run I care less about their mastery of facts, I do not want to suggest that these facts are unimportant. For my syllabus “class” I actually think I would require them to “know” these facts through exams and writing assignments. These neglected knowledges, experiences, and histories are at least as important as canonized versions, and I think we should expect students to know about them. It is, in my opinion, not enough to bring them up for discussion but then to allow them to fade away. Instead, I want students to respect these facts, and to make an investment in knowing and understanding them. So in a sense, I do support a form of transmission/evaluation that hooks and Friere criticize. Of course I would hope that my teaching and evaluations would encourage students to think critically about and act upon this information; if they are going to transform their lives and the world for social justice, I don’t really care if they remember the details or facts. But, considering that many students don’t care or don’t/won’t change much, maybe asking them to at least reckon with these facts once in their life is not such a bad option.