Blog Post 6 – Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s “Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom”

            Paulo Freire’s ideas about how the banking concept can be detrimental to education came through on the first page of Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s article.  Education should be “focused on dialogue instead of a one-way transmission of knowledge . . . , [empowering] individuals . . . as agents of social change” (p. 1).  Beautiful.  My secondary education was a one-way transmission of knowledge: teachers dropped their pearls of wisdom, and students scampered to collect as many of them as possible.  I was never aware of any teachers who conducted unit plans or activities like those described in this paper or by using ideals as Freire promoted.  Why is that?  I’ll never really know the answer, but perhaps during that time and place, educators were not able and encouraged to conduct student-centered lessons.  I suspect the status quo of students gathering pearls of wisdom was thought to be perfectly sufficient.

            I don’t much care for saying that students have “impoverished minds” in referring to Freire’s banking notion of having to deposit knowledge into them (p. 10).  I understand the idea behind calling them “empty receptacles,” but perhaps that term should refer only to students who are children (p. 10).  Even then. . . yuck.  Impoverished minds and empty receptacles are much too harsh to describe anyone, but especially students in adult education.  My students might have lacked the knowledge to write cohesive essays or locate verbs in sentences, but their worldly experiences were often much broader and deeper than what I’ve lived.  I lack any real experience with using edTPA and the Common Core State Standards.  Does that make my mind “impoverished”?  I should hope not.

            The authors stated that “comprehension is an important prerequisite for critique” (p. 3).  I agree.  However, I think that access to texts is the first hurdle to be conquered.  Many of my adult students attended schools in lower socioeconomic areas, similar to that of East Bay High School as described in the article.  During my students’ past educational lives, there were always, always limited access to books and computers.  Our entire region, however, was economically depressed.  There was no wealthy school four miles away over which to drool.

            I have also thought that the literary “canon could be limiting in ways that were problematic and ultimately disempowering” to students (p. 7).  As the article described, students respond better to texts that are relevant to students’ lives.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that they must study only contemporary literature.  I think my Holocaust unit is an example.  Anne Frank’s diary was published 70 years ago.  Not exactly contemporary reading.  However, genocide currently occurs too often in too many places around the world.  If students study occurrences of genocide and other tremendous events from the past—such as the Holocaust—there is a better chance that these events will not be repeated.