Writing Project Proposal

 Team Members: Adam Griffin

Topic: Student power. It’s easy to see the role of the teacher as an oppressor in Freire’s analysis of education and to recognize the ways in which teachers must change those oppressive behaviors. But Freire argues fairly directly that teachers can’t produce student learning or student freedom. On page 6, Freire says “people subjected to domination must fight for their emancipation,” suggesting that progress–where it occurs–is going to result from student power, not professors changing their actions. Use your understanding of Freire’s ideas to analyze the role of student power at WCU, identifying and proposing ways in which students can achieve their own emancipation.

Thesis (working): In Paul Freire’s, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” he clearly points that in all circumstance’s teachers are like oppressors and students are the ones oppressed. In society, there’s a common misconception that teachers are responsible for a student’s success in a classroom. At West Chester University students can learn from each other through connection their knowledge with reality and learning from themselves by not directly teaching themselves.

Quotes:

“In this process, arguments based on “authority” are no longer valid; in order to function, the authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher.” Page 4 pr 4

“Those truly committed to liberation must reject the banking concept in its entirety, adopting instead a concept of women and men as conscious beings, and consciousness as consciousness intent upon the world. They must abandon the educational goal of deposit-making and replace it with the posing of the problems of human beings in their relations with the world.” Page 4

“Liberating education consists in acts of cognition, not transferrals of information. It is a learning situation in which the cognizable object (far from being the end of the cognitive act) intermediates the cognitive actors—teacher on the one hand and students on the other.” (P.4)