Conversations with Freire and Pre-Student Teacher Research

Pre-student teaching poses unique challenges, as I struggle to assume a more prominent teacher role while also devoting a substantial amount of time to my content area coursework.  More than ever before, I feel a twinge of discomfort when transitioning from my exhilarating post as co-teacher in my mentor teacher’s classroom to my old familiar role of student in my literature classes at the university.  Sure, I obviously love literature analysis, and sure, I obviously love to write, but lately an impatience has welled up inside of me, and I find myself longing to set aside Shakespeare and Ethnic literature for now, and jump headlong into teaching.

One of my English classes, however, marries my two roles in a unique way: Theory and Practice in Composition.  Here, Dr. Koupf addresses her students as authorities, as we read and discuss theories pertaining to writing pedagogy.  While the articles we read are inevitably compelling in their positions, and while my professor is frighteningly intelligent, she recognizes that she has never taught at the middle or secondary levels, and so turns to us for suggestions regarding the practical applications of these educational theories.  This dynamic empowers everyone in the room, recognizing each individual as both a teacher and a learner.

Our class recently read and discussed an excerpt from Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This famous chapter, entitled “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education”, presents two opposing classroom philosophies: the banking concept of education, and the problem-posing concept of education.  The banking concept consists of the teacher “depositing” information into the student, who is largely viewed as a receptacle rather than as an active participant in the learning process. In contrast, the problem-posing concept levels the dynamic between teacher and student.  Rather than an authoritarian, oppressive figure, the teacher here acts as a learning facilitator whose primary concern is the development of an individual student’s personal perspective and of their meaningful, contextual understandings (Freire 245).  While Freire arguably over-simplifies an organic and true-to-life classroom experience by reducing it into two, supposedly mutually exclusive binary approaches, his underpinning sentiment has haunted me since I’ve read the piece.

"Boooooooooo!" (he seemed to say)

For example: at my mentor teacher’s request, I lead my class the other day in a sentence diagramming lesson.  After I verbally quizzed the students about what they remembered from our previous diagramming exercises and built on to the diagram with adjectives, Freire poked his little head into my brain, and said, “Mary, your transaction is complete.  Your account balance is: subjects, predicates, articles, and adjectives.  Do you need a receipt?”  Ugh.  These poor freshmen have just passively absorbed by grammar lesson, and to what end?  Do they even understand the reasoning behind sentence diagramming?  What Freire really wants me to ask them is, “Is this meaningful to you?”  It takes a brave teacher to ask that sort of question.

Later that day, I reflected on my surge of guilt and on possible adjustments I could have made to my lesson to create a more problem-posing classroom atmosphere.  Even in situations where students must be fed information, I need to remember to engage in some amount of dialog with them about their perception of such information, about the context within which they view it, about the usefulness of that information to them and to others, and, in turn, their judgment of its relative worth.  If I teach a class full of students how to diagram a sentence, and I deliver that information inside of a vacuum, the exercise proves meaningless (unless, of course, they grow up to become professional sentence diagrammers).  Perhaps through osmosis they will vaguely and subconsciously glean some greater application, but is this backdoor approach more efficient than one that remains transparent, or, better yet, that encourages the students to reason out the merits of the exercise for themselves?

These concepts and questions have piqued my interest in a way that is motivating some pre-student teacher research on my part.  I hope to test my hypothesis, that by increasing two-way intellectual conversation within the classroom, and by empowering my students as Dr. Koupf empowers me, I can increase my students’ motivation to learn, and increase the depth of their understanding of classroom material.  In each lesson, in each moment, this communication and empowerment will look different, and in some instances I may find that either by force of habit or due to the nature of the lesson, I return to a banking method mentality; however, as I’ve stated before, I must abandon notions of perfection and instead solely place my focus on becoming a better teacher.  Let the experiment begin.

Works Cited

Freire, Paulo. "The 'Banking' Concept of Education." Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. 8th ed. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 242-257. Print.