English 323 Friere and Blau - The Spirit of Learning and the Methods of Teaching

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.