Reimaging Banking Concepts Of Education

    Being a part of a "banking" environment can be detrimental to how a student's learning progress can be determined. As in this essay by Freire, they argue that there should be a change in teaching as "banking" has become a norm in the teaching environment where students are shown to know nothing and the teacher/professor is shown to be the one with the most knowledge. "This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits." (Freire 87) Negating this, they show that the teacher should be open to learning from the student as well as they are not entirely clueless. Last semester in Effective Writing, I had a professor open to learning from her students, which I thought was a great approach by a professor putting themselves in a vulnerable position as they, the professional ones, will accept new ideas and learn from their students. However, they are professionals in this area. As this was my first semester in college, it was a good feeling knowing that some professors enjoy hearing about your ideas and are open to exploring them, possibly even adding them to how they teach class. This professor made it clear in the first week of classes that she loved to learn new things from students and even went further in doing her research about that idea. As page 88 states, "The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted them, the less they develop critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of the world" (Freire 87), Implicating that the students have been almost forced in the passive role of only learning one way to do it. My previous professor taught me a valuable life lesson now that I am reflecting on it. You have to learn that there are many ways of doing one thing, and being open-minded can be beneficial for not only college but your post-college career. Lastly, the professor learning from her students is beneficial because it also helps her students grow more by implicating these open-minded strategies as she would include them in many assignments such as peer observations, which assisted students by looking at different points of view seeing what they liked or what they could grow on.