https://docs.google.com/document/d/17eDXSViJqy-IvysGGLNvkM_Zmcvm6SrVQyvCBr1qwI0/edit
Amanda Jiang & Leah Schreffler
Dr. Randall Cream
Writing 120
3 November 2019
Good quality teaching involves interaction and socialization between students. A good professor takes time to understand the student’s background and needs. The teacher builds a relationship with the student. Teachers take shortcuts by posting powerpoints and feeding the information to the students instead of taking the time to teach the content of the class, this way goes against Percy’s and Freire’s ideas of teaching. The way the teacher can teach can be alternated by the students. Creating a learning environment where students are not taught by the teacher allows for a different way of learning. One class that West Chester offers is Transcultural health, a class that teachers teach students as passive objects. Transcultural health can be improved by observation and students teaching classmates.
Teachers assign assignments outside of the classroom where students are forced to teach themselves from observation. Activities, where students observe information outside of the classroom, allows for comprehension and an advanced way of learning instead of being fed information. A quote from Percy states, “…that they have in common the stratagem of avoiding the educator’s direct presentation of the object as a lesson to be learned and restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known, reasserting the sovereignty of knower over known” (Percy 5). Percy explains that the only way a student can learn is by avoiding the teacher’s way of teaching. When students are assigned readings or video assignments, they do not learn as much compared to going somewhere and observing. Students only focused on watching videos and answering given questions rather than understanding the true concepts. Learning outside the four walls of the classroom can significantly improve a student’s academic and developing environmental awareness. By assigning observation assignments beyond the classroom allows students to think outside of the box. This allows students to take the chance to explore and expand their critical thinking. Students can not learn from the teacher and have to discover other ways of learning.
A new way of changing the way students learn is by having the teacher creates activities that will make students teach students the information. College is all about training students to be future leaders and for this to happen, students have to recognize that they have a voice and an opinion. Speaking for yourself is a hard thing to do and learn. Having interaction in the classroom and in the criteria of the course will allow students to learn to become involved in the class. Seeing the bigger picture of the outside world creates an opportunity for students to seek the moment, creating a new way of learning. “No, but it means that the student should know what a fight he has on his hands to rescue the specimen from the educational package. The educator is only partly to blame. For there is nothing the educator can do to provide for this need of the student. Everything the educator does only succeeds in becoming, for the student, part of the educational package” (Percy 5). Percy is saying that the students have to create their own ways of learning because the teacher is not there to provide the students what they need.
