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").

Writing as a Pre-Reading Strategy: Thinking like an Education Philosopher

-Dehumanization and schooling is the theme of the first writing project in two of my English Composition courses this semester. 

We will read chapter two from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he outlines the “banking concept” and “problem-posing” modes of education. Instead of diving directly into his prose, I wanted to see how students were already engaged with Freire’s ideas, even without having read his text. 

To do this, we examined several editorial cartoons that depict the banking mode of education and a couple others that point to the possibility of another mode of education.

After discussing what we observed and interpreted, students had the opportunity to talk in pairs about what they experienced in school. How representative were the cartoons of their own experience or observation? 

Using On-Line Bulletin Boards to Help with Reading

An important skill scholars are supposed to practice in composition is to find meaningful quotes and passages from the texts we read. We expect writers to support their ideas with outside sources. For sure, scholars’ opinions can be rooted in personal observation and experiences. But that isn’t enough; writers need to buttress their positions by quoting other thinkers, “recruiting” other writers’ words and ideas to support their own. 

In addition to finding quotes, developing writers need practice paraphrasing those ideas, rewording those quotes to illustrate how those sources fit into their own arguments. 

To practice finding and paraphrasing quotes, I’ve been experimenting with the bulletin board application Padlet to record and share the intellectual labor students accomplish. My goal was to make the process less solitary and to help the entire class profit from each others’ work. 

After we read and initially discussed chapter two of  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, I divided the class into groups. Each group tackled one of five topics we’d noted during those discussions: banking mode, problem posing, oppression/conformity, freedom/liberation, relevance/real life. I asked students to locate where Freire defined, clarified, or elaborated on those themes, urging them to look for quotes that they thought were especially meaningful or relevant.

Using Music to Distinguish Between "Content" and "Structure"

A major objective in all my classes is for students to distinguish between content and structure, between the meaning of a text and the strategies authors use to construct that meaning. Students typically come into my class with strong summary skills, and they are definitely on the path toward being able to identify an author's main and secondary ideas, i.e., the content. Certainly, they can strengthen those skills - and that’s why they're in my class! 

The more difficult skill to master for practically everyone in my classes is to identify the moves or structures that the authors use to express those ideas. By “moves” and “structures,” I mean what the writer does to express her content: describe, explain, contrast, express effect, tell a story, use dialogue, state a point, or give examples.

Certainly, “meaning” and “moves” are mutually reinforcing, difficult to separate. At the same time, I want students to be able to identify what writers do so they can emulate those moves to express their own ideas. To introduce students to this process, we examined texts students are already deeply invested in: music they love.

Low Stakes + Building an Academic Community: Two for One!

Two important lessons I re-learned during professional development last summer was the importance of assigning low-stakes writing tasks and of building community. During the California Acceleration Program’s Summer Workshop, facilitators urged us to consider using low-stakes (sometimes called “writing-to-learn” activities) to ease students into more complex writing tasks. At the UMOJA Community Summer Learning Institute, we reviewed the significance of building communal intelligence, the intentional calling out and supporting of students efforts to build their knowledge base together. 

This last week, I attempted to weave together both these principles in all four of my classes.  We used a digital bulletin board to compile “meaty” quotes from their readings and the reasons they thought those quotes were meaningful. Students are in the middle of composing a synthesis essay based on texts by Paulo Freire, Jean Anyon, and bell hooks - a pretty heady, complex set of readings for first-time freshman. One of the big objectives of this assignment is to give students practice incorporating quotes into their essay. They have to select quotes that support a larger claim, which not only means finding quotes. It means being able to interpret those quotes, explaining to readers how and why that quote supports the student writer’s synthesis. 

Upping the Intellectual Stakes with Curation

Curation. The word has a cool vibe. It makes me think of museums and art galleries, places where professionals select, collect, and archive particular objects worthy of saving. Curation isn’t simply about squirreling away massive amounts of stuff. Curators don’t willy nilly hoard just anything; they select with intention, with a particular set of standards about what pieces should be included or excluded in their collections.

This is exactly what I did in high school with comic books. I used set of standards, admittedly subjective, to pick certain titles: Iron Fist, The New X-men, and Deathlok, titles I thought were artistically superior with super cool story lines. My standards for curating images and quotes for my Tumblr feed are equally subjective: Are they witty or clever? Are they aesthetically pleasing? Might they find use value in my classrooms? 

It's cool how the word “curation” makes my hobbies sound so smart. A specific word choice elevates something that I enjoy doing into an intellectual process. That'is probably why I enjoy experimenting with curating students’ ideas. This semester, I am using Padlet to curate students’ thinking.