HO Week 7 (10/8) - Education

[As you can see, I'm quite late on this one.]

What is Learning?

Learning is the ability to take a new concept and to digest it--to really understand it. Moreover, true learning will also include applying the new knowledge to your own life and to the greater community around you. Learning is also the ability to make connections between what one is currently studying and what one already knows. It is creating one's view of the world - building a system for how things work.

[Brad had us write for a few minutes in class about what our definition of learning was. That's what I wrote. If you want more info, read my girls' posts. They were good :)]

HO Week 6 (10/1) - Education

Are Students Banks or People?

How to best educate students is an interesting question, and one we will be examining for the next couple of weeks. An educator named Paulo Freire wrote a book entitled The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in which he discusses this topic. In his second chapter, he sets forth two methods of educating. I have experienced both during my life.

In my senior year of high school I took Chinese at a community college. Understandably, most of what we students had to do was memorize vocabulary words. This idea of students being passive receivers/memorizers is what Freire refers to as the "banking concept." The teachers are in total control of the situation, and they are often seen as knowing everything about their subject. They make "deposits" of knowledge into the "banks" (students). Students are supposed to meekly accept, swallow, and parrot whatever the teacher says. This method is almost unavoidable in a foreign language class. When it is employed in other classes (history, for example), however, Freire says that it "minimize[s] or annul[s] the students' creative power" (73) and serves to make them less human.

The English 2 honors class I took last semester was in stark contrast to the banking model. Although the professor did sometimes lecture about what we were reading, she mostly encouraged us to discuss what we had noticed in the texts. This is what Freire calls the "problem posing" method of education. This method focuses on "acts of cognition, not transferrals of information," Freire says (79). It also means that the teacher becomes more of a fellow student - someone who can gain just as much from the class as the "real" students do. "Problem posing" forces students to think things through rather than be spoonfed all the answers.

Clearly, the latter method is preferable.