In your career as a scholar through school and university, can you identify teachers in your life who taught in a way that was oppositional to Friere’s work? Are their teachers who aligned themselves with Friere’s methods? Which did you find beneficial or meaningful? What are the pros and cons of each?
My own experiences are quite different from the standard. For many years, I was homeschooled and within that homeschooling it was primarily self-taught instead of teacher taught. Because of this, most of my discussion will have to be focused on higher education and late high school. The type of curriculum was focused on simply providing information. All the teachers that I can remember from high school have taught in a way that was mostly oppositional to Friere’s work. Often, the type of learning that Paulo Freire advocated for was simply used as a varnish for the education while still being against it. Particularly, most of the technically type subjects that I undertook, Math, Accounting, went against Paulo Freire’s type of work. English had more elements of Paulo Freire’s approach included in the learning with a focus on critical thinking skills; however it was still quite focused on simply imparting information. The critical thinking was generally limited to the specific confines of the current subject focus. It did not include a subject wide critical thinking approach. The only subject that I would consider not have had this was Graphics and IPT. The teachers I had for those subjects were very much focused on letting a student have their own approach to solving a particular problem. Separate from this, most of my teachers in high school very much placed themselves as right on this topic. Thinking back on it, the subjects that I was most engaged with, Accounting, IPT and Graphics, had teachers that encouraged students to have a discussion with them. This is distinctly different from most of my higher education in university. Almost all of my lecturers promoted critical thinking and a more equal relationship. This has increased my enjoyment of many subjects. From my perspective, it makes subjects feel less like learning and more like a discussion. From my understanding, a non-Freire style of learning would be generally beneficial in some technical style subjects, primarily in ones where there is a primary method to solving a problem. For example, accounting has particular rules that must be followed and, in most cases, a more critical thinking approach to the subject would limit the ability to learn those rules, in my opinion. I would also say that learning should, however, become more of a give and take, which Paulo Freire does advocate for.
References:
only dog on the left (2020). Pedagogy of the Oppressed – Paulo Freire | Intro to Critical Pedagogy. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcEKvBTyMCU [Accessed 13 Feb. 2023].
