Liberatory Classroom Practice

In his insightful book When Student’s Have Power, professor Ira Shor advocates the need to allow college-level students to assume “power” over their educational experience. Here professor Shor, like his mentor Paulo Freire, denounces the current-traditional model of banking education--the practice of teaching where the instructor “deposits” information “into” the students. In the current-traditional model, the input is always selected by the authority, or teacher, and the student is a passive recipient of knowledge which has been preselected as both meaningful and useful for the student’s future development. Professor Shor argues that this current-traditional model of teaching methodology not only places the “content” of the course beyond any control of the student, but it also prescibes the method of delivery for our students.

Beginnings

Though I started teaching at the university-level intending to “stimulate” students and to make my classes “student centered,” my practice soon reverted to that which I had endured. While I was spouting the rhetoric of the “educational left,” I was practicing a teaching methodology which was in the center of “mainstream” pedagogy. My English Composition class was a bizarre mix of “strange” field trips and ‘alternative’ assignments, but underlying all of this entertainment was a college teacher waltzing students through traditional rhetorical models of composition as well as a nasty dose of “academic” writing. I massaged both my conscience and my ego by insisting to both myself and anyone else who would listen that I had adapted “content” which was serving to allow my students to think critically. (One might ask how I decided what it was these students were to think critically about, or better yet, one might ask if my students weren’t already doing a good bit of critical thinking prior to enrolling in Freshman Composition). Upon reflection, my two years as a Freshman Composition Instructor probably served only to further perpetuate the oppressive, current-traditional model of education (at least for the eighty or so working class students passing through the doors of my Composition classroom).

Light

During my last semester teaching Freshman Comp, I became aquainted with the work of both Paulo Freire and Ira Shor. Sadly, for my students, I could not immediately synthesize this exciting new pedagogy with my own classroom practice; however, after reading these two thought provoking theorists, I became increasingly disturbed about what it is that we’re doing to students on a daily basis. Currently, I am teaching students for whom English is a second language, and I am even more frustrated in some ways about the “banking” system that has been constructed “for” my students.

Sharing Authority

I have lifted, from Ira Shor, an excellent tool for at least starting to ackowledge the need to empower students: negotiating the syllabus. Shor contends that students need to have some “say” in the make-up of classroom procedures, rules, evaluation, and assignments if we really want to “liberate” rather than domesticate them. Giving up a good deal of control is a really scary idea, and I have FAR from perfected it, but the “blank” syllabus for the first day of class and negotiating content, evaluation, and presentation methods with students seems to me a great place to start. I have made an attempt at syllabus negotiation by distributing my blank syllabus on the very first day of class in order to promote discussion and negotiation about what, how and why we are going to study “Literature” or “Public Speaking” for some fifteen weeks.

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