I find myself struggling with a desire to attempt one form of teaching while balancing that desire with a dose of reality that tempers any urge I have to teach at all. I’m speaking of Freire’s critical pedagogy approach to teaching, and, more specifically, its implications for learner autonomy. Before I delve too deeply into this whole issue, let me first say something that I’ve been meaning to express since the first week of class: I am not training to be the head of an ELL classroom. I have never had experience in a bilingual environment, nor do I think I am qualified to. My aim is to teach English to those who already know the language. These TESOL classes are for context-building and to help me if I ever come into contact with a student who has limited communication in the classroom. It’s not that I don’t like students who don’t speak English- far from it. But I will most likely never be the teacher in a class wherein the students don’t have a fairly good understanding of English. Thus, putting each of my examples in class and reading these lessons and articles to mirror an L2 context, these are as foreign to me as English is to those students. Therefore, I will provide this example in a context that is familiar to me, and comfortable.
I think it is incredibly important for students to become autonomous learners, for them to “become authors of their own worlds.” (Kuma 142). But how- and I cannot put enough emphasis on that word- how can we attain this when there are standards, measurable and measured standards, that we are required to meet? I know this is an age-old question which, again, boils down to the age-old dichotomy of ideal vs. practical. It would be ideal to teach about things that interest our students and promote their learning rather than their knowledge. Let me explain that. We view, under the scope of standards and standardization, knowledge as equivalent with learning. Students are considered learning so long as they can reproduce knowledge, and students are knowledgeable if their aims are directed towards the abstract of learning. One leads to the other. If knowledge = learning, and learning = knowledge, then the two are at a one-to-one relationship and are, consequently indistinguishable. I refer to this, broadly, as knowledge, and it’s what tests and testers are interested in gaining a measure of.
The ideal would be to concern ourselves with our students’ learning, which would be how they process information, what connections they make to the information, how this information applies to their lives and the lives of their friends, family, fellow citizens, what-have-you. This is the aim of critical pedagogy, to develop in our students the capacity to understand their place in their society, culture, and their world, and to understand the powers that help and hinder them in that tentative position. The approach is about teaching students how to think to pursue their own learning even outside of the classroom, and who could argue that this is the ideal? Having the ability to think through any problem rather than a specific content knowledge that helps one work through a specific problem only is far more helpful in life and in school. But, as I said, this is ideal. We would like to think that it is practical too, but bad news: we, as teachers, don’t determine what is practical for our students and what isn’t. The government, the testing centers, specific schools, each of these entities and more determine what is practical for our students to know and understand, and the bad news is that this practical application of education is defined by what we can measure to make sure that everyone who journeys through our school systems can work through the same specific problems and know the same knowledge about World War II. We can’t argue with this; we need the measure. We need to make sure that everyone has, at least, some basic knowledge with which to get through life. But that is the crux of the whole problem!
Because standards are important and necessary to make sure that no one “falls through the cracks,” this is why we continually struggle with the fight between learning and knowledge. It is also why I grow more and more disillusioned when the question is begged, “what can we do to make our students better and more informed?” That question depends solely on the context of who’s asking and what are their interests. As the number of contexts are myriad, we could never come to a complete and full answer, even with a million years to find the root of it all. What, then, is the damn point? We’re fighting for our students, yes, and how noble of us indeed. But when there is a need for standard knowledge and a need for critical, original thought, how can we possibly balance the two to see our educational system through to the other side?
I know that there is no single answer, and nor could there be. But it seems the issue lies in the pursuit of the ideal- namely, that several different parties have different ideas of even that. How do we define a good student as opposed to how a testing center defines a good student? What qualities do we agree on and what don’t we? If we can’t even agree on the image of what our students should be attaining, it is impossible for them to attain it. It’s a pipe dream. All that we can keep doing, I guess, is plugging along and hoping against all hope that we change at least one life before we die. The only issue is that, even that legacy becomes questionable depending on who is viewing our achievement and through what lens. It’s enough to make me scream and rail and fight and fight, and I suppose that is what defines a good teacher, at least: one who isn’t content with their students becoming what anyone thinks they should be, but one who bleeds for them to become what they need to be.
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