A Student’s View On Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy Of The Oppressed

Have you ever sat in a classroom lecture and were so confused by the material being presented to you, that you questioned why you had to be learning it in the first place?  

Personally, I can say that I’ve been there. There’s nothing worse than feeling like the slowest person in the room and feeling like it’s your fault for not comprehending what’s being taught. It’s become an expectation that as students we need to memorize and simply accept everything being taught to us from the moment we step into a classroom. Our current methods of education don’t include a negotiation between an educator and a student as to what they will be learning or how they will be learning it. It’s naturally just assumed that the educator has created a well thought out lesson plan that will accommodate every student. As a result, our education system has slowly morphed into what is known as the “Banking model of education.” 

This concept was established by Paulo Freire an educator and philosopher who believed teachers act as narrators and deposit information into students, while the students act as depositories, memorizing the information that is being given to them. He accuses this model to be creatively constricting to students by increasing their lack of critical thinking and therefore, never allowing the effect of the material to reach its full potential. As a student, I can say that I’ve been on the receiving end of the banking model. Throughout my life, I’ve had teachers teach not for the sake of having us learn, but for our performance on standardized tests. The curriculum was heavily shaped to make students appear as if they understood the material by teaching in a way that satisfied the exams. Ultimately, I performed well on most of my exams but unfortunately much of the material I “learned” was quickly forgotten.

Formal Analysis: Blog #4

When looking at a true piece of art, the human eye tends to only look at the abstract version of it. In art museums, when asked to describe the artwork, people just simply describe what’s apparent. But, what happens when we look deeper into the artist’s work? This is called formal analysis. With formal analysis, you look at the work of art and try to understand what the artist is trying to convey visually. Along with this attempt at understanding, an individual also provides their own context into the piece of art. You add your life experiences, your emotions, your education, and with this there’s a brand new interpretation. Sure there is no absolute definition of formal analysis, due to the fact that everybody’s interpretation is different. However, there are certain key components that makeup the foundation of formal analysis.

These key components are color, lines, space and mass, scale, composition, and historical context. With color, the basic step to understanding it is to identify what colors were used and how they were used. Are they vibrant or are they dull?

Lines in formal analysis can distinguish the art piece by determining if the strokes are broken up or strong and continous. This can tell you a little bit about what the artist was feeling at that point in time. Was the artist put together and mentally strong (having strong and continous lines) or was his life chaotic and messy (broken up lines)? This may also depend on how you are feeling at that point in time while looking at the work of art.

Space and mass can determine whether or not the image shows a sense of three dimensional space and portrays it as if it had weight or volume. This concept makes the image come to life as if you are looking at it in real time, during that period. With scale, the artist depicts images in smaller or larger forms. For example, an artist would depict gods as larger images while regular humans as tiny specks in comparison. This is a very important key concept when analyzing a piece of art.

The composition and historical context of art tells us what the artist was drawing and what the world was like during the life of the artist. This can really tell a story because by understnding the time period of the artist, we can understand why he/she drew the image the way he/she did. If you drew that same image that the artist drew today, it would definitely represent something different because times are different. Just look at the art placed in the Museum of Modern Art. The art pieces you see there, would have never been drawn or painted a century ago. That is because times were surely different in the 1800’s. Time is a huge concept in formal analysis and truly helps in understanding the art.

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Blog post #3 Pedagogy and power

To Friere, the banking model of education is the standard format of a classroom where a teacher, the knowledge holder, shares their knowledge with the students, the knowledge receivers, without any input from the receivers themselves.  This empowers the teachers because they are exalted beyond the receivers and their power is unchecked.  The students are disempowered because the power that they have is only the power that the teachers have given them.  If the teacher doesn’t feel the need to listen to their students, they don’t have to, because of the power they hold.  I’ve been in many classes that were modeled in this fashion and I’ve never had any enthusiasm for them.  The banking model has led me to study more independently and not rely on my teachers.  It has also made me someone who cares less about retaining the knowledge learned in class and applying it to my life, and more about simply passing the class with a good grade.  The banking model makes students robotic and not prepared for the real world.  They may lose independence because they are trained not to think for themselves.  One positive of the banking model, however, is that it can teach discipline and independent study, which are things that will be necessary in certain situations later in life.

Blog Post #3: The Banking Model

The banking model is a concept that was created by Paulo Freire, who was a brazilian educator and philosopher. Freire was an advocate of critical pedagogy. Critical Pedagogy is a social movement that recognizes the negative impact that a bad education system has on an already opressed impoverished community. Out of this concept, Freire created The Banking Model.

The Banking Model is basically the belief that educators aren’t teaching effectively. One of the errors that they make, is the way they approach their students. Freire points out that teachers come into a classroom and automatically make it known that they are superior to their students. They send a message that clearly states “We are not equal.” This creates a divide between the relationship of a student and a teacher. A student subconciously gets into this mindset where they believe that their ignorance can be cured with the knowledge that this teacher can give them. This results in the student being 100% reliant on the teacher to come up with every decision in the classroom. This inhibits a students ability to think for themselves, to be independent, and to be a critical thinker. Instead of having divergent qualities, students become machine-like. They end up lacking depth which can affect them negatively in their lives.

I believe that The Banking Model obviously empowers teachers and disempowers students. Teachers dont realize that they carry such an important thing in their hands, which is knowledge. They also don’t realize that their is a right and wrong way to execute their knowledge and carrying it out the wrong way can be disastrous to the student. Most children spend twelve years of their life in a classroom and if they are all being taught and raised to be these dull adults then they are just being set up for failure. They eventually will start to believe that life has the same enviorment as a classroom. Most teachers have this huge ego because they believe that the only ones who are ignorant are the students. A degree makes them feel as though they have nothing left to learn when facing young adults. When in reality, teachers can learn just as much from them.

Although I have had my share of teachers who teach with the obvious belief that I was inferior to them, I have been very fortunate to have had some educators in my life, specifically english teachers, who have influenced me enough to have the ability to be a critical thinker and to be divergent. There is a huge dichotomy between the teachers who believed me to be inferior and the teachers who have treated me to be their equal. I would always be excited to be in the classroom with those english teachers who included me in their teaching and leave that class feeling good about what I just did for forty-five minutes.  When dealing with teachers who treated me the exact opposite way, I would leave that class feeling drained and just not excited to go back the next day. These english teachers have had enough impact on me to make me want to become an amazing educator just like them. Imagine the type of change there could be if all educators were like my english teachers.

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Pedagogy and Power

What is the Banking Model?

The Banking model is a term Paulo Freire uses, to explain how the education system works. In the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Freire describes the Banking Model as students being like “empty containers” that they are “filled” by teachers and our sole purpose is to “receive, memorize, and repeat.” or “Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” like banking. In other words the teachers know everything and the students know nothing. This empowers teachers for we as students are taught to accept the information given without questioning it, taking away the chance for us to think critically.

The closest I have come to encountering this model was with a teacher who gave great amounts of information with out clarifying it. She would expect us to know everything and wouldn’t really tell us why it was important often just leaving us memorize. It sometimes made it harder to understand but it also made you put in more effort into the class.

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tHe BAnKing MOdel and the Education System

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire describes and evaluates the educational system and explores the teacher, student relationship, and societal relationship. Through his “Banking Model Proposal,” he criticizes the education system by explaining that students are essentially sponges who “deposit” information into their minds through rote memorization and through other impractical ways. Freire explains how knowledge is a “gift” that is bestowed upon students and that students should be taught effective ways on how to analyze and comprehend information rather than memorizing random strings of information. Also, Freire explains how destructive it is for students to passively rely on their teachers to feed them information as it will destroy their sense of reality as they become adults.

In all honestly, I have not experienced this lack of ownership in the educational setting. My high school teachers focused heavily on the concept of analysis. My English teachers would assign a novel every month and the homework assignments were analytical papers that focused on specific themes. Although I am a really bad writer and I dislike essays, I am grateful for my teachers’ efforts. If there is one class that heavily relied on memorization, it would be my high school Immunology class. Every lesson required rote memorization and the success of memorization reflected upon the tests and quizzes. I remember for one test, I had to memorize more than 30 different types of immune cells and their special properties and functions! The worst part was that their names were devastatingly long. Aside from my personal anecdote, I agree with Freire and his critiques on the education system. Hopefully, more teachers will understand the value and efficacy of analytical-styled teaching.

 

Pedagogy and Power

The banking model, described by Friere, is a system of which the teacher “deposits” information into their predecessors. This system isn’t perfect but is implemented into everyday life in other places other than a classroom setting.

The system empowers the voice of the “teacher” position. The one who leads or provides the guidance and successfully imprints their information into those students is in the place of power because they have the ability and unchallenged credibility to make statements whether they are one hundred percent factual or not. This disempowers the students because they go on to repeat what they have gained from that person and could be told misleading information they are told to believe in.

This model is very common in my education route. Almost every teacher follow the guidelines in which society dictates they are the one who can’t be disputed through pure authority. Certainly, this method has worked when my teachers took on a creative approach to ease the loads of information conveyed through the daily work. There are clear disadvantages to this method as well. Some of which I have encountered was that the teacher wasn’t clear with the information they tried to teach and also they didn’t seem very well educated in the subject themselves. They sometimes would side track and end up costing the whole class valuable notes that were very significant on a final exam. Other times included the teacher with a lack of interest and engagement to connect with the class and thus left the class uninterested in focusing on the class; many put their focus elsewhere like playing on their phones and angering the teacher even more.

Pedagogy and Power

Paulo Freire was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who wrote an influential book called Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In this book he touches on the idea of education where he states that the learning method is most likely the “Banking Model”. Freire refers to the banking model in order to criticize the way education is provided to the student. In his own words Freire says that students’s brains are like an empty container that can only be filled with knowledge from the teacher. Furthermore in the classroom only the teacher is allowed to talk and is the only person wise and knowledgeable. In the other hand, the student is not to speak nor challenge the knowledge given to him/her. This method clearly empowers the “intelligent” teacher and oppresses the student.

In my own case, I have experienced the banking model while I was in First and Second grade. I studied in Mexico my whole elementary school, but in the beginning I had the same teacher for two years. She was very mean. If any of the students had a question she would tell us to shut up, literally, and she would follow that sentence with “you are only allowed to speak when I ask you to.” She also used violence as a learning method because she would hit the students with a metallic ruler which would provoke tears on us. The only acceptable knowledge came from her and only her. It is until now that I have learned what that experience is called. However during that time the only positive thing I could get was to continue into third grade where teachers where more humane. 

The Banking Model is Disadvantageous

Paulo Freire came up with the concept known as The Banking Model in his book known as “Pedagogy of the Oppressed.” The “Banking Model” touches upon the relationship of students and teachers, specifically how students learn and teachers teach in a classroom. The job of students in a classroom is to remember the information the instructor provides. The students don’t participate in another way, they just simply take in the information that’s given to them and memorize it for the test. The “Banking Model” within educational systems is common and it prevents students from developing certain skills that make them critical thinkers. It doesn’t give students a chance to voice their opinion or to bring out their creatibity, but to just absorb the information the teacher brings forth in a classroom. This leads to the disempowerment of students and empowerment of teachers, of course, at the expense of the students.

Personally, I experienced this “Banking Model” concept in high school. In my junior year of high school, my Psychology teacher had prepared slides and copy and pasted the information provided in the textbook onto these slides. She would just read through the slides each class and not explain it. The only positive thing my fellow classmates and I got out of this was that we were able to challenge ourselves by teaching everything on our own. The reason why it’s easier for the teacher to explain it because in certain classes particularly psychology, it’s easier to understand the concept using real-life examples to help us relate. Since much explanations for concepts in my Psychology class wasn’t provided it was hard to understand. Another negative was that it took a lot of extra effort and time. In the classroom, I was daydreaming and didn’t participate so much because I didn’t think there was a point to. If my teacher explained it as she went rather than just reading the slides, it would have saved time so that I can focus more on my other classes. I was always googling examples of the concepts that I learned to fully understand it instead of just memorizing it. It’s easier to memorize when you actually understand.

Pedagogy & Power

In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed Paulo Freire the explains the banking model as the current system of education and the specifize the relationship between the teachers and the students. According to Freire the teacher fills the head of their students with ideas detaching from development of themselves, the problem the students have is never reach full understanding the knowledge because of the lack of context or they don’t have any reason to apply it to anything to appreciate its full value. Freire believes this turns students into better explain as “storage units” while the teachers are the depositing knowledge into, explaining the banking model title. Freire states this is a misguided system of education, where teachers are the oppressors and the students are the oppressed. This model of education greatly empowers the teacher and disempowers the student. Paulo Freire want to change how student can be taught by coming to their own conclusion when presented a problem. He wants management of both.

In my daily education I can see the effect of how a teacher can become unintentional a oppressor. It is an odd feeling when the knowledge given isn’t as rewarding when you find it on your own. Granted that there are some of the students and I have seen quite a lot of never approach the issue critically and never get pass. We can be given the tools to work on problems but if the teacher doesn’t exercise the students capacity to develop it becomes a problem. In math and science we can rationalize this knowledge to everyday life but it’s never useful if your profession doesn’t require it. There were cases when the students and the teachers are so disconnected that the majority of the class failed to grasp it because he wasn’t push for it, the lack of interest from students was also a problem. From the ages of 10 to 18 how the hell are people supposed to care, When the internet is a thing. Overall I think that as chaotic as people in american society they can figure out on their own.

Q: don’t teachers have to go to teaching school? ….. Oh no!