Analysis Blog #1

In a “problem-posing” class, regardless if it’s English, History, Psychology, Math, or any other solid subject, the teacher needs to pass the information to the students in a way they feel engaged with it. Students not only need to remember everything the teacher has deposited into their brains but rather, they need to understand it, process it and truly learn it. Here is when it’s really important the instructors focus on teaching first the critical thinking skills the students will need to employ once they’re given any kind of information on a lecture. They need to develop a high level of critical consciousness that will allow them to intervene and question not only what they don’t get to completely grasp but also what they feel they don’t completely agree with or what they might have learned differently before. “Problem-posing education bases itself on creativity and stimulates true reflection and action upon reality, thereby responding to the vocation of persons as beings only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation” (Freire, 9).

“Problem-posing” education goes beyond the typical static class where teachers lecture and discharge a high volume of facts and information which the students are much more interested in getting it all and rapidly write as much as they can on their notebooks, rather than really grasping the concepts and allowing time and mind to make the questions they consider important for their own learning process. “Problem-posing education regards dialogue as indispensable to the act of cognition which unveils reality” (Freire, 9).

What the teachers might really expect to learn from their students is different ways of seeing and understanding the world. Every person in a group may have a total different point of view towards the same exact concept, image or thing. This happens because everyone has lived, and grown differently and those different experiences shape the way we look at things and understand reality. If the teachers paid more attention to what they could learn from students’ experiences they could even have a wider and richer perspective of the topics they’re about to teach and that way they could communicate things allowing and inviting everyone to take their own position and develop their own ideas according to their beliefs in the first place. “Problem-posing theory and practice take the people’s historicity as their starting point” (Freire, 9).

“In Problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves… the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world” (Freire, 9). To me an “authentic form of thought and action” would be the consciousness one can adopt after applying critical thinking skills to the way we think about life and also the way we behave and our day-to-day actions. In conclusion, it’s the practice of a ‘problem-posing’ lifestyle.

Pre-Reading Blog

Paulo Freire was born in Recife, Brazil in 1921. He was born to a middle class family that experienced the poverty and economic issues of the Great Depression during 1929. This experience clearly shaped the way he thought about the poor and helped him to develop his particular educational viewpoint. During 1946, Freire worked among the illiterate poor and started to have a non-orthodox form that can be considered as liberation theology which was first applied in 1961 when 300 sugarcane workers learned how to read and write in only 45 days; this way the Brazilian government approved the cultural circles across the country. In 1967 he published his first book followed by his most popular book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This work was very successful but it wasn’t published in Brazil until 1974 because he was a Christian socialist and the country didn’t allow the work to be published until a political liberalization took place.

Paulo Freire was concerned with a philosophy of education that came from classical thoughts from Plato and also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers that followed a way of thinking based on educating native populations not with traditional teaching that was just an extension of the culture of the colonizer, but with new, modern, and anti-colonial education. Critical pedagogy was the foundation of Freire’s practices, this is contrary to the “banking concept of education” in which the student is viewed as an empty recipient to be filled by the professor. He thought that there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship but most important he suggests that a deep reciprocity needs to be inserted into the teacher and student notion, this way the teacher can learn and the learner can teach as the main role in the education activity, and the authority the teacher holds must not be allowed to degenerate into authoritarianism. This way the educational method can be a practice of democracy.

"There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world."
—Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire