Humaira Zakaria
ENGL C0831
Professor Gleason
Summary
April 20, 2010
Social Justice Initiative for Basic Writing (Summary)
Students enrolled n Basic Writing courses are individuals who are identified as “people of color, poor, working class, veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, documented and undocumented immigrants, and people with disabilities.” These individuals experience social injustice due to the current economic conditions in the United States, and decreased financial support from federal, state and local aids for public schools, adult education and ESL programs.
Funding comes from results from standardized tests that tests to track and measure academic progress and based on the results, reward with financial support. This strategy roadblocks students in their educational progress and limits their access to college, while also hindering students in basic writing courses. Basic writing is also usually referred to as a remedial class, which marginalizes resources needed for the courses. Usually these basic writing courses will not receive new content.
Through the ever decreasing access to funding causes conditions for education for our students to dwindle. These conditions keeps students from completing college. The “remedial” model that basic writing curriculum are centered around “isolates the student and the skill from real college contexts.” The unjust quality of education conditions disrupts students from “successful matriculation and retention.” Even the teachers are part of the unjust education structure. They are not paid enough they have large workloads, and there is no job security. By improving conditions of education for student will vicariously improve the conditions for teachers.
Students have “insufficient access top preparation for college-level courses based on systemic educational inequities in public schools: Insufficient Access to financial aid counseling: Insufficient access to academic advising and personal counseling: Insufficient access to disability services: and Insufficient access to academic and fine arts courses that foster and sustain students growth in areas related to progress in basic writing.”
To solve these insufficiencies, teachers must “re-commit” to the NCTE Resolution “On Support for Motivated but Inadequately Prepared College Students” goals of 1974. These goals are to have the education faculty to allocate funding for students who are motivated but not well prepared for college. Administrators, professors and legislators need to persuade college and university administrator and other stakeholders to allocate sustainable funding for programs that provide access to retention services: advocate for providing basic writing courses that include college level content: remove the label “remedial”: Educate students on obtaining equitable education: Promoting programs using all available means: and Linking basic writing to social justice so that communities gain economic and social wealth.
Bernstein, Susan Naomi. “Social Justice Initiative for Basic Writing.” Conference on Basic Writing. 7.1 (2008). Web. 12 April, 2010.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Paulo Freire Theories
Humaira Zakaria
ENGL C0831
Professor Gleason
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
April 6, 2010
Paulo Freire’s Key Concepts in Pedagogy of The Oppressed
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed examines and analyzes the education system based on the struggle for equality of social classes. Freire’s own struggle within a class-based society lead him to reject it, prompting a radical pedagogy. He proposes a form of pedagogy that exemplifies just treatment of all people. Some of his main concepts were focused on the dichotomy between the teacher and student relationship, the Banking Method vs. Problem posing, the true meaning behind dialogue and having a Dialogic Classroom, and what it means to have critical consciousness so that an individual may transform the world.
Freire’s childhood was the catalyst for his critical analysis of class-based systems and the education structure that perpetuated his rejection of such a system. Even facing his many struggles with poverty and hunger, he felt that his life was not predetermined. He did not believe that the best solution for him was to accept his struggles and circumstances as made apparent to him. Even from a young age he believed that there were flaws with the world, these flaws should not continue to exist, and that the world needed to be changed. (Freire, “Letters” 13). Paulo Friere came to two conclusions based on his childhood; 1. He never let himself fall into fatalism and 2. Due to his Christian beliefs, he never accepted his impoverish circumstances as an expression of God’s
Zakaria 2
wishes. He knew that there was something very wrong with the world he lived in, and that needed to be changed (Freire, “Letters” 14).
As a child, Paulo Freire was detached from his education. His main focus was of hunger. His hunger had disrupted his learning in school. In his education, his peers and his capacity to memorize texts meant that they were intelligent. He continuously failed to memorize information which “reflected” his ignorance (Freire, “Letters” 15). Due to his lack of food he had learning difficulties. But his circumstances were not taken into account by his educators (Freire, “Letters” 16). Instead, schools were elitist and did not consider
that difficult conditions, no matter how devastating, engender the kid who experience them the knowledge to survive… difficulties would diminish if the schools took into consideration the culture of the oppressed… From their own knowledge, students could move to the systematic knowledge taught by schools (Freire, “Letters” 16)
This can only be carried out by teachers that are willing to be progressive, void of a class-based system that does take into account the student and his experiences.
The teacher-student-relationship in a class-based education system reflects the relationship between an oppressor and the oppressed. This type of relationship between the students and teacher “involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)… The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”(Freire, “Pedagogy” 71). The student does not think about what the teacher teaches; instead the student records the information, memorizes
Zakaria 3
the information and then repeats the information that the teacher has bestowed.
Students put merit in their oppressors and the education that is presented to them
because of the class-based institutional structure and lack of confidence and worth, thus developing students to become containers that the teacher fills with their own ideas, knowledge, and thoughts. This is known as the “banking concept of education.” This helps students to become managed individuals instead of thinking individuals because education has become
an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor… The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world (Freire, “Pedagogy” 72-73).
The danger to this type of education is because if students “accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 73). With the banking method
a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is a spectator, not re-creator… the person is not a conscious being… rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside (Freire, “Pedagogy” 75).
Education thus needs to help develop individuals into becoming critically
Zakaria 4
conscious individuals. To have critical consciousness “people develop their power to
perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 83). A classroom based around the banking-method cannot produce critically conscience students. An alternative to the banking-method is problem-posing.
The banking-method only makes students docile individuals, that are passive within their world, in contrast to problem-posing education which constantly introduces and strips away the masks of reality, “unveiling” the world for what it truly is. Students are continuously posed with issues and problems relating to themselves, whether it be political, social, or personal issues. Students faced with problems will feel challenged and in return will respond to the challenge with a solution (Freire, “Pedagogy” 81). As students try to come up with solutions their “response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understanding… Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 81). Through problem-posing, student do not simply just exist in the world where they do not contribute, instead through their understanding and consciousness of their world, they can transform the world by being active participants.
Within a problem-posing classroom, dialogue is necessary. Without dialogue, one cannot communicate with other individuals. The Banking-method is devoid of dialogue and communication. Two people cannot have a true dialogue unless they exchange critical thinking. The goal is to
Zakaria 5
perceive reality as a process, as transformation, rather than a static entity- thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved… Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated (Freire, “Pedagogy” 92-92).
For Teachers and students alike to negotiate is the basis for a Dialogic classroom. A dialogic classroom allows the teacher to be a student and a student to also be a teacher. In a Dialogic classroom both teacher and student reflect
about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means of which people discover each other to be “in a situation.” Only as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley, and they can come to perceive it as an objective-problematic situation- only then can commitment exist. Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled (Freire, “Pedagogy“ 109).
To have a problem-posing curricula, teacher and student first need to dialogue. Dialogue leads to an exchange of critical ideas and problems. Once negotiating importance and facing challenges can an individual transform their world through developing meaning from communication. The goal of problem-posing in a dialogic classroom is to transform
Zakaria 6
an individual’s reality for the better.
Ira Shor’s Freire for the Classroom exemplifies the success of a problem-posing dialogical classroom that Nan Elsasser established as a literacy classroom for Bahamian women. Nan Elsasser’s students were the first generation of women who had gone to college and enter the business world. These women had problems with their writing. The goal was to have these women transcribe their inner speech to a finalized written product (Shor 91). Nan Elsessar had issues with her approach to the class, and turned to her students for help. Teacher and students selected three issues to write about, and then voted on a theme.
These women were raised in a two parent house-hold, 75% of these women were mothers and two-thirds of these women were single parents. The topic of marriage effected their lives in the social, economical and emotional realm (Shor 92). The teacher and students had a dialogue and negotiated on a topic that the students were to write about; Marriage. The topic of marriage was relative to the Bahamian women’s lives. Through the dialogic approach, the topic was given, and now the students are to explore that topic.
The women had broken up into groups. They discussed their ideas on what they wanted to explore. The women had come up with several subtopics that fell under the arena of marriage; housework: divorce: sexuality: and domestic violence.
The teacher in turn looks for additional reading sources for her students that bridged “the distance between students’ lives and society” (Shor 93). These readings were to prompt students to talk about their individual problems, common experiences and
Zakaria 7
the larger social world (Shor 93).
Nan Elsessar’s students were to pass through three phases of their writing process on the topic of marriage. First they are to “elaborate their own experience more skillfully, and they perceive stronger links between their own lives and the larger social context” (Shor 93). The women explored what marriage meant in the Bahamas, in which the husbands end up taking out his frustrations on his family, beating his wife, not contributing financially and leaving home for days at a time. The wife then has no support from her husband, but because divorce is taboo, the women deal with their ordeal as best as possible (Shor 94-95).
In phase two the students “reach outside their own experience more skillfully, and they perceive stronger links between their own lives and the larger sources of knowledge… They become more confident about gaining knowledge from class dialogues and reading (Shor 93- 95). In this phase, Nan posed a problem for the Bahamian women. The student debated on if women ask to be raped and asked for additional readings on the subject. Nan introduced the idea of rhetorical forms such as cause and effect, defining, and compare and contrast. Since wives are beaten by their husbands, Nan had the students compare and contrast the relationships between beatings and rape (Shor 96-97).
In Phase three the students “become critically conscious of the way society affects their lives, and they begin to use writing as a means of intervening in their own social environment (Shor 93). The women share their knowledge on the issues they experience within their personal lives on how the Bahamian men treat their wives and family. The
Zakaria 8
students wrote a manifesto titled “Letter to Bahamian Men” and had it published by Bahamian newspapers. Their manifesto comprised of various sections: an introduction in which they explain the role and oppression of women in the Bahamian society: Women a victims of men’s inconsiderate actions: Men financially neglecting the family: Men’s lack of help at home: Men’s lack of responsibility for their children: Men’s failure to satisfy women sexually: and a conclusion in which recommendations are given for the Bahamian men to be better (Shor 98). The Bahamian women became conscientious of their circumstances by examining their lives and through their writings are transforming their lives and their community (their world).
The Bahamian women were oppressed by their husbands and their society because they were to not leave their husbands (even if the women are being beat, and raped and neglected). They brought to fruition their problems through praxis by taking their lessons and applying their knowledge through action. They built upon through research and dialogue and presented their education in writing so that their circumstances will better. They took initiative to transform their lives. There are two stages of Freire’s proposed pedagogy. First
the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation (Freire, “Pedagogy” 54).
Education is to liberate people from their oppression so that they can be active
Zakaria 9
contributors to their own lives, instead of people that are being managed within their lives by others. Freire’s ideology on pedagogy is to transform the oppressed so that they may transform the world.
Zakaria 10
Works Cited
Freire, Paulo. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. Trans. Donaldo Macedo. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. Print.
Shor, Ira. Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
ENGL C0831
Professor Gleason
Pedagogy of the Oppressed
April 6, 2010
Paulo Freire’s Key Concepts in Pedagogy of The Oppressed
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed examines and analyzes the education system based on the struggle for equality of social classes. Freire’s own struggle within a class-based society lead him to reject it, prompting a radical pedagogy. He proposes a form of pedagogy that exemplifies just treatment of all people. Some of his main concepts were focused on the dichotomy between the teacher and student relationship, the Banking Method vs. Problem posing, the true meaning behind dialogue and having a Dialogic Classroom, and what it means to have critical consciousness so that an individual may transform the world.
Freire’s childhood was the catalyst for his critical analysis of class-based systems and the education structure that perpetuated his rejection of such a system. Even facing his many struggles with poverty and hunger, he felt that his life was not predetermined. He did not believe that the best solution for him was to accept his struggles and circumstances as made apparent to him. Even from a young age he believed that there were flaws with the world, these flaws should not continue to exist, and that the world needed to be changed. (Freire, “Letters” 13). Paulo Friere came to two conclusions based on his childhood; 1. He never let himself fall into fatalism and 2. Due to his Christian beliefs, he never accepted his impoverish circumstances as an expression of God’s
Zakaria 2
wishes. He knew that there was something very wrong with the world he lived in, and that needed to be changed (Freire, “Letters” 14).
As a child, Paulo Freire was detached from his education. His main focus was of hunger. His hunger had disrupted his learning in school. In his education, his peers and his capacity to memorize texts meant that they were intelligent. He continuously failed to memorize information which “reflected” his ignorance (Freire, “Letters” 15). Due to his lack of food he had learning difficulties. But his circumstances were not taken into account by his educators (Freire, “Letters” 16). Instead, schools were elitist and did not consider
that difficult conditions, no matter how devastating, engender the kid who experience them the knowledge to survive… difficulties would diminish if the schools took into consideration the culture of the oppressed… From their own knowledge, students could move to the systematic knowledge taught by schools (Freire, “Letters” 16)
This can only be carried out by teachers that are willing to be progressive, void of a class-based system that does take into account the student and his experiences.
The teacher-student-relationship in a class-based education system reflects the relationship between an oppressor and the oppressed. This type of relationship between the students and teacher “involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)… The teacher talks about reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”(Freire, “Pedagogy” 71). The student does not think about what the teacher teaches; instead the student records the information, memorizes
Zakaria 3
the information and then repeats the information that the teacher has bestowed.
Students put merit in their oppressors and the education that is presented to them
because of the class-based institutional structure and lack of confidence and worth, thus developing students to become containers that the teacher fills with their own ideas, knowledge, and thoughts. This is known as the “banking concept of education.” This helps students to become managed individuals instead of thinking individuals because education has become
an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor… The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world (Freire, “Pedagogy” 72-73).
The danger to this type of education is because if students “accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 73). With the banking method
a person is merely in the world, not with the world or with others; the individual is a spectator, not re-creator… the person is not a conscious being… rather the possessor of a consciousness: an empty “mind” passively open to the reception of deposits of reality from the world outside (Freire, “Pedagogy” 75).
Education thus needs to help develop individuals into becoming critically
Zakaria 4
conscious individuals. To have critical consciousness “people develop their power to
perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 83). A classroom based around the banking-method cannot produce critically conscience students. An alternative to the banking-method is problem-posing.
The banking-method only makes students docile individuals, that are passive within their world, in contrast to problem-posing education which constantly introduces and strips away the masks of reality, “unveiling” the world for what it truly is. Students are continuously posed with issues and problems relating to themselves, whether it be political, social, or personal issues. Students faced with problems will feel challenged and in return will respond to the challenge with a solution (Freire, “Pedagogy” 81). As students try to come up with solutions their “response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understanding… Authentic reflection considers neither abstract man nor the world without people, but people in their relations with the world” (Freire, “Pedagogy” 81). Through problem-posing, student do not simply just exist in the world where they do not contribute, instead through their understanding and consciousness of their world, they can transform the world by being active participants.
Within a problem-posing classroom, dialogue is necessary. Without dialogue, one cannot communicate with other individuals. The Banking-method is devoid of dialogue and communication. Two people cannot have a true dialogue unless they exchange critical thinking. The goal is to
Zakaria 5
perceive reality as a process, as transformation, rather than a static entity- thinking which does not separate itself from action, but constantly immerses itself in temporality without fear of the risks involved… Without dialogue there is no communication, and without communication there can be no true education. Education which is able to resolve the contradiction between teacher and student takes place in a situation in which both address their act of cognition to the object by which they are mediated (Freire, “Pedagogy” 92-92).
For Teachers and students alike to negotiate is the basis for a Dialogic classroom. A dialogic classroom allows the teacher to be a student and a student to also be a teacher. In a Dialogic classroom both teacher and student reflect
about the very condition of existence: critical thinking by means of which people discover each other to be “in a situation.” Only as this situation ceases to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley, and they can come to perceive it as an objective-problematic situation- only then can commitment exist. Humankind emerge from their submersion and acquire the ability to intervene in reality as it is unveiled (Freire, “Pedagogy“ 109).
To have a problem-posing curricula, teacher and student first need to dialogue. Dialogue leads to an exchange of critical ideas and problems. Once negotiating importance and facing challenges can an individual transform their world through developing meaning from communication. The goal of problem-posing in a dialogic classroom is to transform
Zakaria 6
an individual’s reality for the better.
Ira Shor’s Freire for the Classroom exemplifies the success of a problem-posing dialogical classroom that Nan Elsasser established as a literacy classroom for Bahamian women. Nan Elsasser’s students were the first generation of women who had gone to college and enter the business world. These women had problems with their writing. The goal was to have these women transcribe their inner speech to a finalized written product (Shor 91). Nan Elsessar had issues with her approach to the class, and turned to her students for help. Teacher and students selected three issues to write about, and then voted on a theme.
These women were raised in a two parent house-hold, 75% of these women were mothers and two-thirds of these women were single parents. The topic of marriage effected their lives in the social, economical and emotional realm (Shor 92). The teacher and students had a dialogue and negotiated on a topic that the students were to write about; Marriage. The topic of marriage was relative to the Bahamian women’s lives. Through the dialogic approach, the topic was given, and now the students are to explore that topic.
The women had broken up into groups. They discussed their ideas on what they wanted to explore. The women had come up with several subtopics that fell under the arena of marriage; housework: divorce: sexuality: and domestic violence.
The teacher in turn looks for additional reading sources for her students that bridged “the distance between students’ lives and society” (Shor 93). These readings were to prompt students to talk about their individual problems, common experiences and
Zakaria 7
the larger social world (Shor 93).
Nan Elsessar’s students were to pass through three phases of their writing process on the topic of marriage. First they are to “elaborate their own experience more skillfully, and they perceive stronger links between their own lives and the larger social context” (Shor 93). The women explored what marriage meant in the Bahamas, in which the husbands end up taking out his frustrations on his family, beating his wife, not contributing financially and leaving home for days at a time. The wife then has no support from her husband, but because divorce is taboo, the women deal with their ordeal as best as possible (Shor 94-95).
In phase two the students “reach outside their own experience more skillfully, and they perceive stronger links between their own lives and the larger sources of knowledge… They become more confident about gaining knowledge from class dialogues and reading (Shor 93- 95). In this phase, Nan posed a problem for the Bahamian women. The student debated on if women ask to be raped and asked for additional readings on the subject. Nan introduced the idea of rhetorical forms such as cause and effect, defining, and compare and contrast. Since wives are beaten by their husbands, Nan had the students compare and contrast the relationships between beatings and rape (Shor 96-97).
In Phase three the students “become critically conscious of the way society affects their lives, and they begin to use writing as a means of intervening in their own social environment (Shor 93). The women share their knowledge on the issues they experience within their personal lives on how the Bahamian men treat their wives and family. The
Zakaria 8
students wrote a manifesto titled “Letter to Bahamian Men” and had it published by Bahamian newspapers. Their manifesto comprised of various sections: an introduction in which they explain the role and oppression of women in the Bahamian society: Women a victims of men’s inconsiderate actions: Men financially neglecting the family: Men’s lack of help at home: Men’s lack of responsibility for their children: Men’s failure to satisfy women sexually: and a conclusion in which recommendations are given for the Bahamian men to be better (Shor 98). The Bahamian women became conscientious of their circumstances by examining their lives and through their writings are transforming their lives and their community (their world).
The Bahamian women were oppressed by their husbands and their society because they were to not leave their husbands (even if the women are being beat, and raped and neglected). They brought to fruition their problems through praxis by taking their lessons and applying their knowledge through action. They built upon through research and dialogue and presented their education in writing so that their circumstances will better. They took initiative to transform their lives. There are two stages of Freire’s proposed pedagogy. First
the oppressed unveil the world of oppression and through the praxis commit themselves to its transformation. In the second stage, in which the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation (Freire, “Pedagogy” 54).
Education is to liberate people from their oppression so that they can be active
Zakaria 9
contributors to their own lives, instead of people that are being managed within their lives by others. Freire’s ideology on pedagogy is to transform the oppressed so that they may transform the world.
Zakaria 10
Works Cited
Freire, Paulo. Letters to Cristina: Reflections on My Life and Work. Trans. Donaldo Macedo. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print
---. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. Print.
Shor, Ira. Freire for the Classroom: A Sourcebook for Liberatory Teaching. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
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