Response to Freire

It’s an idea that I’ve heard so much it has acquired a tinny hallmark greeting card ring to it. “Education must begin with the solution to the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students” (Freire 55). Teachers learn just as much from their students as the students themselves learn. I can see the pastel rose petals now. My cynicism for the popular incantations of this phrase stems, I think, from the inherent inequality of the teaching we think of students providing teachers. In its popular context, I think that most of the time we imagine students teaching teachers values or some kind of life lesson. Students learn biology from their teachers. Teachers learn patience from their students. This kind of ‘learning’ is still unequal but we mask it with the repetition of a revolutionary idea as a platitude. I think that Freire meant more.

If we want the learning that teachers and students glean from each other it can’t be hard-edged on the student’s side and soft and fuzzy on the teacher’s. It has to be full-bodied learning for both.

I can think of one of my former teachers who, I believe, lived this concept out. Jamie was an adjunct lecturer in the English department at my undergrad institution. She taught one of the required courses—an introduction to literary theory—along with filling in for the medieval literature professor who was on sabbatical. I took literary theory with her. It’s hard to figure out what to say about Jamie save that she was awesome. I think, though, that she really did learn as much in the course as we did. It’s not as though she learned the material in the course. There is no question that she knew far more about literary criticism than we did. Incidentally, I think Freire wouldn’t ask for teachers to not know the subject they were teaching. His own classroom practices still involved research and planning and some explicit teaching. Jamie did teach us material, but she struggled with the ideas right along with us. She was very open about those struggles with us. I remember after reading about feminist literary criticism Jamie questioning what a commitment to feminism meant to her and how could she reconcile that belief with the circumstances of her life. The whole reason she was teaching that class was because she dropped out of graduate school to have a baby. How could she reconcile her life to her ideas?

I think that what Jamie did created solidarity with us her students. As Freire wrote, “The bank-clerk educator does not realize that there is no true security in his hypertrophied role, that one must seek to live with others in solidarity” (57). Jamie achieved this not by being patronizing or trying to claim that she “got” us but by honestly grappling with the same ideas that we were starting to grapple with ourselves.