The Oppression of Pedagogy

Banking vs. problem-posing. Domination vs. liberation. Necrophily vs. biophily. Reading assignments vs. … well, what? I grit my teeth and muster the energy for my last semester of classes, I think back over 25-odd years of school, and I wonder how much of it fell into the kind of educational model that Freire railed against, and how much of it would have passed his muster.

There's been plenty of banking. Plenty of memorization of this and that, taking-in of Important Material. I was always decent at the former, being trained by middle class parents to like being a good student, and thus doing whatever it took. The latter I still find myself doing, and will in fact do a helluva lot more between now and next fall when I take my comps. Does reading stuff that's important to a class/field of study count as the banking method? Surely, the kind of reading I did for the GRE was: I just had to memorize the notion that "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was a hallmark of British Romanticism, that the Shakespearean Sonnet had 12 rhyming lines and a couplet at the end (right? I seem to have forgotten – maybe proof that what I've put in my bank seems to have escaped).

Facing the other side of the educational fence (or, rather, straddling it), I wonder if my own pedagogy qualifies as Freire's liberating kind or not. Surely, I have assigned reading, assessed knowledge, evaluated performance, decided on and focused on Important Material. As a FYC teacher and – more significantly – as a technical/professional communication teacher, I'm supposed to prepare my students for success in writing in their fields. I'm helping them fit into the system. Of course, the training I've received in this composition teaching, behind which I think I see Freire looming, has emphasized the contextual nature of literacy and the political nature of all rhetoric; so thus, I try to help my students see their places and communicative acts as contextual and political. To help them see their places in the system. That sounds like Freire, doesn't it? And yet: how much are they really looking to see and change the system, and how much are they just wanting to fit in, get through my class, get through college, move back to Seattle, and work for Microsoft?

Whatever the answer, Microsoft Word seems to be aware of my dissent, and it's threatening to crash on me and delete this entry. So I think I'll post now.