Prep. for 5 December

As I mentioned when I met you briefly yesterday, there are some things you might find it useful to look at for next week:

• What has this got to do with curriculum?

• I know we are not about schools, but try to read chapter 1 of Illich's polemic if you can; it's an interesting argument...

• From a similar stable, Friere is almost unreadable, but this page is a good introduction, from a brilliant site (and see below*)

• These people are talking about transformative rather than simply informative learning. 

• You may conceivably be interested (although it is unlikely!) in this paper, which touches on the argument from another side--some consequences of the banking model and the constraints we talked about on 21 November.

• ...which touches in turn on to Anna Sfard's two metaphors for learning.

• and from a different angle, related to the Becker article I mentioned last week, look at this page on situated learning, just as a reminder, because we did mention it very briefly in Unit 2. Do follow the link to the Infed page on this, too, for more detail.

Which sort of comes full circle to the first bullet point.

That's probably more than enough to be going on with, but please come with your questions and ideas arising from your reading for the next session, and we'll see where the discussion takes us... (Saying which is begging** some questions about the nature of the curriculum, of course.)

(PS --and also relevant is this excellent tirade by Frank Furedi in today's Times Higher Education, which I think I shall link to from my more moderate pages here and here.)

(PPS --possibly of some interest in relation to the diversity and distinctive needs component of this unit, an interesting NYT piece on employing people on the autistic spectrum. It only touches in passing on the issue of how they may best be helped to learn, but that is the kind of question you may want to address in the groupwork.)

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Friere and the "Banking Model" of education; the page I linked to does not spell out the characteristics of the banking model in detail, but Friere himself sets them out thus:

•  the teacher teaches and the students are taught; 
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; 
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; 
• the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly; 
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; 
• the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; 
• the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; 
• the teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; 
• the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; 
•  the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. 

(Paulo Freire, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 59.) 

** Yes, it is "begging" the question, not merely "raising" or "posing" it--it's a nice point of usage.