Making a Withdrawal - Stepping Away from the Banking Method of Education.

I think I might be in love with Paulo Freire.

He wouldn't be my first academic love (an odd and eclectic category that includes C.S. Lewis, Cicero, and--perhaps most embarrassingly--James Paul Gee). While I would never claim that Freire's style in any way resembles theirs (or that theirs resemble each other's), one thing they do all have in common is their ability to craft beautiful, and elegantly simple prose. They take things I hold dear, and they illuminate them with language that is engaging--sometimes even stunning--and yet still easy to understand. With Lewis, it's Christianity. With Cicero, it's the nature of discourse itself. And with Gee and Freire....it's students.

Freire's exploration of the banking model of education (where students are simply vessels where instructors "deposit" knowledge until they are full) strikes to the core of a lesson I've been slowly learning the more that I teach. The traditional education system is a top-down affair. The teacher is the authority. The students are subjects. As I have told students time and again, the classroom is not a democracy.

But what Freire points out--and what I'm realizing I really believe--is that, however true that is, it's not okay. Or, at the very least, it's a system that needs to be made visible.

So often, instructors of college freshmen lament their "inability" to exercise critical thought. They rail against students caught in the nets of five paragraph essays, stringent page requirements, and the ever cliched transitions of "First....secondly....and in conclusion..." Yet what they don't acknowledge is that, given our current system of education, to expect anything else is ludicrous. As Freire points out:

The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (73)

In other words, our students spend years learning how to memorize and regurgitate "knowledge" on command. They learn to adapt to a system. And it's especially evident in our "good" students (which, of course, we find en mass in college settings)...because these are the ones who learned how to play the game without making waves. They don't challenge the system, because they've learned that this is something that's frowned upon. They don't question the teacher, because that way leads to danger and stress and bad grades. They have learned to be vessels.

It's a system that I hate, and yet I know I have also done my time as one of of the "well-intentioned bank-clerk teachers who do not realize that they are only serving to dehumanize" (75). I generally am an open book. I wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I'm quick to share my opinions....and when I occupy a position of authority (as I do every day in the classroom), those seemingly harmless opinions become law. And this remains just as true when I walk in with naive ideas of instilling a social justice-esque curriculum, if my means of doing so follows the banking method. Well-intentioned or not, if I simply inform my students of "how the world is," I am part of the problem. "[true humanists] cannot use banking educational methods in the pursuit of liberation, for they would only negate that very pursuit. Nor may a revolutionary society inherit these methods from an oppressor society" (78).

I share my opinions with my class. I feel that, risky as it is, it's more dishonest to pretend to be utterly objective. But I try to remember that "liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals [sic] of information" (79). My job is not to inform my students how they should view the world. My job is to get them to start thinking about it...to start questioning the systems that have been invisible to them and which they've taken for granted.

I might not like the conclusions they come to. But that's the point. Their agreement with me means nothing if I never give them a chance to not.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

All the things she said...and he said....and me.

If recent proposals for legislation over copyright tell us nothing else, they tell us (clearly) that authorship has become increasingly complex in our digital age. Or, perhaps, has simply made that complexity very, very visible.

It's a conflict that instructors and students know well. Our school charters and handbooks come equipped with plagiarism policies and our course syllabai detail the penalties of violating them. Instructors stress originality, individual voice, and creativity....while asking students to include an increasing number of outside sources in their work. These are important lessons--knowledge doesn't exist in a vacuum. We prove that we know what we know by engaging in conversations with others in those fields. Verbally or visually, that means acknowledging the other communicators that are out there and then having them respond to us and to each other.

But what happens when that knowledge is just a hyperlink away? Or when the sheer proliferation of available information makes it difficult to discern between "expert" sources and "amateurs?"

Accusations of plagiarism in the composition classroom are loaded. Instructors often feel violated when they receive plagiarized works, as if these texts somehow reflect a students' character or opinion of the instructor. Students plagiarize because they are lazy, disrespectful, inattentive, or (to be horribly politically incorrect) "dumb." In fact, a lot of the things instructors say about plagiarism seem to echo the attitudes Joseph Williams describes towards grammatical errors in his essay "The Phenomenology of Error." Responding to critical language regarding poor grammar, Williams says:

The last thing I want to seem is sanctimonious. But...what happens in Cambodia and Afghanistan could more reasonably be called horrible atrocities. The likes of Idi Amin qualify as legitimate oafs. Idiots we have more than enough of in our state institutions. And while simply [sic] illiteracy is the condition of billions, it does not characterize those who use disinterested in its original sense (152).

In many ways, I'd say instructor responses to plagiarism follow a very similar line. Intellectual theft is a serious crime...but how many of our students are truly operating under the intent of claiming someone else's work as their own? In amateur works, uncertainties and incomplete understanding about citation and "proper" research can lead to shortcuts or mistakes that, to all intents and purposes, look like plagiarism.

Jim Ridolfo and Danielle DeVoss take a different approach towards information appropriation. For them, research becomes a matter of remixing old information into something new. In other words, "[r]emixing—or the process of taking old pieces of text, images, sounds, and video and stitching them together to form a new product—is how individual writers and communities build common values; it is how composers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Remix is perhaps the premier contemporary composing practice." In order for them to approach writing as a remix, however, Ridolfo and Devoss stress that instructors need to get rid of the idea that remix is simply cutting and pasting, or that this process is restricted only to music. Remixing is any type of composition where something new is created from bits and pieces of other works that have either been recontextualized and/or modified by the new "author." 

Remixing and composition can be a tricky subject. Blatant intellectual theft is a problem and those distinctions need to be explored. But viewing research and research papers as remixes of other information allows us to participate in the idea of diaspora that Paul Butler explores in his article "Style in the Diaspora of Composition Studies." By viewing knowledge as shared and transformable, it opens the possibility for solid research in multiple genres, styles, and mediums.