Author: Rosette Zeitoune

Pedagogy and Power

The banking model is a way Paulo Freire described and critiqued the education system. This model shows a student as an empty container being filled with knowledge by their educator. Freire argued  that teachers don’t communicate with the students, they make “deposits” and the students are expected to receive, memorize, and repeat the information. This empowers the teachers because they have the power to instill anything they’d like into the students, but this is at the students expense because they don’t develop a creative process. I’ve experienced this all throughout elementary school and high school. The teacher taught the information and I was expected to spit back their words on tests and essays. It wasn’t completely negative, I learned all of the facts about the subject I learned about and did well on all of my tests and assignments because it was all memorization. Now that I’m in college, I have a say and in most of my classes we have discussions about the topic we are learning about. I enjoy writing creative essays and expressing my opinion.

What art means to me

Art has many definitions. There are many elements to art and many categories. Some things that pop into my head when I hear art are architecture, design, textiles, sculpture, paintings, patterns, landscape, and expression. I am not a creative person and most of my life I didn’t like art. I never knew what to draw or where to start. I took a product design class in high school and we used zentangle patterns as the base of the class. I enjoyed this class because we learned a lot of patterns and used the in our product designs. I liked that I didn’t have to be too creative because I had the patterns to choose from but I got to make my own personal design. I hope to learn about every element of art and learn to appreciate all of its details.