Aphra Sutherland

Science 511
March 4, 2020
Word Count: 576
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Reading Response

Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed begins by centering around the concept of how
narrative is constructed between learners and teachers. Freire dismisses traditional narrative
relationships in education, in which knowledge is shaped by teachers to be a finite and
transferrable object. He summarily rejects the “banking concept,” where teachers, by default,
hold all knowledge and transfer it to students, and instead proposes a learning environment in
which all participants play the roles of teachers and learners. This inherently undermines a social
system of oppression, propped up by educational systems where creativity is stifled, since it
prevents learners from understanding their own oppression.
Freire, however, believes that this state of oppression cannot persist, given the efforts and
experience of motivated learners, but an advanced movement away from oppression can be
further supported by educators who prioritize critical thinking and model it alongside their
students through true communication. Communication prevents the placement of real people in
the category of objects because it interrupts traditional relationships and dynamics that are taught
in traditional classrooms where knowledge is inflexible. This allows for what Freire calls
“problem-posing” education, which is built on exploring a verisimilitude of conscious identities
that are be freely expressed regardless of teacher-student dynamics. Through this kind of
education, learners can ask important questions about their relationship with the world and how
that relationship has changed over time and will continue to change. It is this dialogue that Freire
strongly believes traditional classrooms have sought to diminish, preventing people from
understanding their place in the world. Therefore, to enter into this dialogue undermines
oppressive, objectifying systems and replaces them with a human-world relationship that is open
to change and re-definition.
This article seems much more abstract than previous readings and thinking about how to
apply it to my mentorship feels more challenging. One thing I’ve been thinking about lately,
however, is that learning gets a lot harder when you feel demoralized, and while this is a concept
we’ve touched on before with The Nature of Learning, I think that this has some bearing here
too. I think one of my hopes with participating in this program is to help students in these labs
feel like they have control over what they learn and their success, even in a discipline that feels
very much like Freire’s “banking” education concept in that there are a lot of right and wrong,
dichotomized answers. However, students that feel ownership and control over the material they
are learning will also hopefully feel control over how they use this knowledge and what they can
accomplish with this. So, while this is quite an abstraction from Freire’s writing, I think that I’d
like to help students remember what they’re learning about and why – that is, what can they do if
and when they have mastery of this knowledge. There’s a lot of room to use scientific knowledge
in larger battles against systemic oppression and the learning of this knowledge can be treated as
a tool against, rather than a symptom of, these systems. For instance, learning about how our
actions impact coral reefs is a way to open ourselves up to how we exist in the world, rather than
just learning how coral reefs respond to a disconnected pH or temperature change. This example
likely will not work for everyone but I hope, by having a little bit more time and less traditional
classroom power, I can help students find these reasons to learn.