Emma Richey - Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire explores education as being oppressive to people by defining them as information receptors. When teachers stand at the board and simply spew out material, this fosters a classroom environment where students no longer need to learn the material; students are now just expected to absorb information and file it away in their memory, just to reiterate the same knowledge on their future exams. By these means, education is constricting the value of being a true student, thus becoming oppressive.

One of his philosophies is problem-posing education which is a liberating alternative to traditional teaching methods. It is a method of teaching that encourages critical thinking by treating education as the "practice of freedom," where students are active participants rather than passive recipients. From my high school experience, my Technology in Education teacher was a very hands-on person. He believed that while we had to complete the community college Dual Enrollment curriculum, we should be able to do so in a way that allowed us to apply our work and knowledge into hands-on, student teaching. In that class, we often used our curriculum to create our own lesson plans; through this, all of us students taught one another the lessons that we created, as well as going into classrooms and teaching real students. By having this experience, I felt like I was truly applying my knowledge of different online learning strategies, instead of just absorbing the material. For example, I learned about what flipped classroom was; however, the true knowledge of it came by creating a flipped classroom lesson plan of my own. In that class, I felt capable and confident in myself and my learning, a strong feeling that I never truly got from other classes.

Through Freire’s work and my own personal experiences, I have learned to be more aware when teaching, and cognizance of myself and the environment around me is something that I have further developed in Heroes and Mystics. Knowing that little events and actions can change the course of a mythical journey expands to how those actions can easily affect a learner’s experience. With this, I hope to be an aware and ready teacher who can recognize how to help her students’ needs whenever possible!