Students Curate and Share Examples of Freire's Modes of Education

As students in my composition courses prepare to write essays that take a position on Freire, we spent time collecting images, poems, and quotes. While students basically "get" Freire's ideas, I wanted to assess whether students could find illustrations on their own and if they could explain how those images exemplify Freire's ideas. In other words, do students know what I mean for them to know? 

Students have already read and analyzed a variety of poems and images that illustrate the Banking Concept and Problem Posing Modes of education. Those clips are included on the below Padlet, the ones labeled "Henry A."  For this particular assignment, a student looked for their own resources and had to explain in writing how those resources illustrate Freire's ideas.  

This Padlet task supports the "big essay" assignment on Freire's ideas. Students have two options for the  prompt: "The kind of education I deserve" and "The education that Southwestern College students require to solve our community's problems." Freire's two modes of education serve as our "theoretical framework" to help students articulate their answers, answers they've already been addressing for a few weeks previously (see previous entry titled "Writing as a Pre-Reading Strategy").


This challenge allowed me to assess how well students understand the material (they do!). And students are developing explanatory skills, justifying how their references indeed depict a concept. Indeed, what written can quickly be revised into sections of their essay where they have to explain Freire's ideas to their readers; they are composing short parts of a draft in a low stakes situation. 

Moreover, the entire class benefits from our collective labor. Students shared examples, and students' explanations teach each other, thus increasing our communal knowledge. The implicit lessons? I see at least two: We are "smarter together." We can use theory to "read our world." 

If you aren't familiar with Freire's notions about Banking Concept and Problem Posing Mode, can you figure out those ideas from the students' entries? What other examples can you add to this list of models? Share them below in the comments section.