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.

If a Writer Blogs in the Middle of the Internet, Will Anybody Read?

Why write?

It's a question I hear all the time. From students. From relatives. From myself. Why am I doing this?

The fact that I'm even putting these thoughts on "paper" (does the turn of phrase still count in the digital realm) supposes--perhaps vainly--that someone will read it. That they will care. And it's there that my students often have the most difficulty. I can't even blame them. Writing papers in sterilized settings for an audience of one...what impact can they have? I can have them construct an audience. I can have them twist their prose to match the expectations of this invisible force. But they always know. It's a facade as heavy and stifling as thick makeup, clogging the pores and smoothing the edges into something unnatural. Fake.

Of course, Walter Ong (1) might say that there's no real difference between my class's "pretend" audience and a "real" audience--at least so far as it pertains to written discourse. Writing this, I'm creating my readers in my head; I make assumptions about their interests, their purpose for coming here, and what tone will inevitably interest them or drive them away. And Ong's approach is certainly practical. Unless I'm writing for one person and one person alone, it's unlikely that my audience will fit into a nice, neat box (and even then, there are issues of identity and knowing and masks...but that is an altogether different topic). Yet, as easy as it is to say "it's all in our heads!" that doesn't feel right, either.

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford (2) have an approach that is more my style. They talk about an interaction of reality and imagination--the intersection of the "real" audience and the audience I've created in my head. It's tied up in social perceptions and assumptions and communication. It's messy and complex and involves a whole lot of language, and that appeals to me. Ideas aren't neat. Life isn't black and white. Why should writing be?

So I write anyway, and I ask my students to write. I ask them to write for their "real" audience (me. Always me) while holding that imaginary audience in their heads. I ask them to think about the messy intersections of what matters and who it matters to and what it takes to communicate with those people. We talk about (or, I hope we talk about) how we are always responding to the world around us (3). We don't write in a vacuum. We don't even think in a vacuum. And, in those cases where our voice can't seem to find its place in the society we're presented with, we try to make ourselves heard. We navigate a confusing mess of societal pressures and expectations to claim something that (we hope) is utterly and uniquely "us" (4).

Why write?

Because I have to. Because I'm finding my voice, and the only way I can do that is by talking and listening to other people talk. Because I love language.Because I care. I care even when others aren't listening. I care because others aren't listening. And because I know of no better way to impact the world around me.

And maybe, just maybe, someone will hear.

1. Ong - The Writer's Audience is Always Fiction
2. Ede and Lunsford - Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy
3. Lefevre - Invention as a Social Act
4. Royster - When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own, Lanham - Where's the Action?

Dear Judge Baugh...

This will be short, mostly because I'm not sure I have the words to properly convey how heartbroken I am right now. I also am not sure I can trust myself to be entirely coherent. But I have to try. For whoever stumbles across this blog, or maybe only for myself, I have to say something.

For the past two days, I've scrolled past a handful of news headlines and facebook statuses decrying a sentence passed down by a judge where a 49 year old man was sentenced to 30 days in prison after the rape of a 14 year old girl led to her suicide. I didn't scroll past them because I agreed with the sentence. I scrolled past them because it didn't occur to me that, today, after all the publicity with Todd Akin's atrociously ridiculous claims of "legitimate rape" and the events of Stuebenville and Delhi that this could actually be true. After all, hasn't this been publicized enough? Surely people have started to realize how pervasive rape culture is and how devastating it is to our children. Our boys. Our girls.

I am furious and heartbroken that I was wrong. I'm appalled that, when I finally did click on a passing link, it wasn't to see an article from some backwater publication that needed to be double-checked for sincerity on Snopes. I don't have words to describe how awful it is to see a rape condoned because the victim was "troubled."

Judge Todd Baugh has defended his decision by saying that Stacey Dean Rambold has already lost his job, his wife, and will have to register as a sex offender...and hasn't his life already been ruined enough?

Except this is not about "ruining" one man's life. Whatever I feel towards Rambold, that's not the point. The point is that he did that ruination to himself. He is a (presumably) mature, sane, consenting adult.

She. Was. 14.

She had a name. Cherice Morales.

She had a future and it was stolen from her.

Has he suffered enough? That's not my call to make (though I would argue that, no. He hasn't. How do you ever "make up" for emotionally manipulating, sexually violating, and destroying a young life?). But what I do know is that this ruling sends a very clear message to all the young men and women who are in Morales's position right now. Because they're out there. They're broken and, yes, "troubled" and scared and tired. And they've just been told that, even if anyone found out what they were going through...well...losing your job and sitting in a cell for 30 days is penalty enough.

Because that sounds like a fair exchange, doesn't it?