I am personally of the belief that by showing students the truth about their current situation and help them learn about the social, economic and other structural factors that are standing in their way, that I could empower the students to take charge and work harder to get where they want and need to go. I want them to see their obtaining an education as an act of social justice (and possibly even minor rebellion), something to do both for themselves and society at large.
On the flip side, this may just make them think that everything is hopeless and out of reach. I don't want them coming out of this kind of unit thinking that they are less than, that the cards are impossibly stacked against them, that everything is doomed to repeat itself.
Then there are the implementation questions + my initial thoughts on them:
- Which classes would I present this information to? I want to say all of them, I can relate this kind of topic to World History, Economics and all my government classes. But at the same time, that may not be realistic.
- When would I teach this to the students? I think that this might be something to do near the beginning of the year. Starting with the personal and working outwards to the global (or national in US Government). Maybe instead of focusing on the schools I would instead focus on the communities at large and talk about the structural arguments towards both the achievement gap and poverty rates. Could I get away with spending a week on this kind of unit? There are many books that students have loved reading in the past (I could get a class set of Our America and also look at books/essays by William Julius Wilson -among others) and begin by showing what social studies can do while working on basic reading and writing skills and issues of social justice that directly pertain to my students.
3 comments:
I think you might be able to teach the older students, but from what I've heard from you they don't seem like the most reasonable bunch. I can definitely see it being disheartening for them, especially if they don't have a lot of motivation to begin with. It could easily become just another excuse for why they're not doing as well as they should be.
Hey Laura
I read your blog entry right after reading this: http://city-journal.org/2009/19_2_freirian-pedagogy.html
I rarely agree with the City Journal, but having not read enough Freire, not taught in inner-city schools and not gone through the teacher process process, it's hard for me to know if author has a point.
The "banking concept" seems rightfully condemned by Freire. Teaching English in Hong Kong was tough because many students felt that if I could teach well enough they would passively learn the language.
The article mentions ED Hirsch’s Core Knowledge schools—which I'd never heard of before—as an example of how the banking concept does work.
It seems like your ideas are good mix of the two, maintaining a role as teacher and depositing knowledge while at the same time 'problem-posing'.
I'd be curious to hear your take on the article.
I have read a little Friere, but not from the book that this person is talking about. It is true though, a lot of professors love him, and what I have read I enjoyed. I find the dichotomy that the article raises to be strange: that content rich instruction and student centered instruction are mutually exclusive. It is true that a well designed lecture can reach out to students, but from my limited experience, that rarely is enough for them to understand. So you have to have a mixture of both getting the students information through various mediums and having them interact with it.
In general I find the article to be too extreme to take seriously. There will be people politically indoctrinating their students wherever you go (on all political sides), but teaching for social justice (as I think both Friere and most teachers who tackle it believe) is about empowering students to make choices, be critical thinkers, not telling them which choices to make. It is also about exposing students to an alternative world view, one that explains why there is a cycle of poverty, why they're stuck in it, other forms of exploitation that our lifestyles permit around the world, etc. In a lot of ways I think it is what your articles do, exposes the problems society is facing and bringing them into the public eye.
Plus this guy falls into the same trap as Friere, he doesn't offer any alternatives, he doesn't say how these 'core knowledge' schools even operate and are succeeding, he just offers it as a footnote.
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