With no discussion to
go off of for this blog post, I’m just going to provide a brief analysis of the
readings I completed prior to Thursday’s class.
Additionally I will attempt to incorporate the prompt provided during
Thursday’s class.
I found the Freire reading incredibly helpful from a
teaching philosophy perspective. The
comparisons it employed were well thought out and easily applicable to daily
classroom life. I have certainly had
teachers who used the “banking” method of teaching. They viewed their students as empty vessels
to be filled with any knowledge they deigned to provide to us. As I enter the field of teaching, quite
literally during the student teaching portion of my program beginning this week,
I have really begun to evaluate in earnest what I want my teaching personality
and approach to be. While I can read,
theorize, and imagine what my first days alone in the classroom will be like,
ultimately the refining process for an educator is never finished. Learning is an endless cycle of humility that
relies on the combined skills and knowledge of multiple parties in order to
function effectively. However, I can
already say that I want to tackle problems with my students rather than
oppressing them under the reign of my vast and impenetrable knowledge. I’ve included one quote I found particularly
poignant from the Freire text: “The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot
be carried out in isolation or individualism, but only in fellowship and solidarity;
therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relationship between the
oppressors and the oppressed. No one can
be authentically human while he prevents others from being so.” (p. 85)
Either in comparison to or in cooperation with Freire's writings, the Blau
piece was structured in a very different manner than was the Friere piece, but
in terms of classroom applicability—it was far more accessible. I don’t think I will ever tire of reading
classroom stories. They are often
uplifting even when the point is not necessarily to inspire but to warn. I see classroom teaching as an opportunity to
perpetuate my love of knowledge to a new generation of learners and
teachers. I highlighted, starred, and
otherwise exclaimed over one passage of Blau’s writing especially: “How can one
teach what one doesn’t know? As if the teaching of literature were essentially
a matter of a teacher teaching to students the teacher’s own finished reading
of a text and not what it means to engage in reading of a text, including how a
competent reader proceeds with a text that is frustratingly difficult to
understand.” (p. 23) I find this to be the crux of English teaching. If I simply tell the students what I know, I
am not encouraging them to pursue new, deeper, or different meaning for
themselves—I am instructing them to take my word for it. Learning requires curiosity and exploration
to truly function. When we as teachers
stifle that creativity through rigid lectures or demands for them to search their knowledge banks for the “right answer”
we teach students how to pass school, not how to explore and digest the complexities of the world they
live in.
