In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire argues against the banking model of education, “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.” In place of the banking model, Freire advocates for “problem-posing education,” in which a classroom or learning environment becomes a space for asking questions -- a space of cognition, not information. How can we create the necessary trust for this work to happen? How do we bridge the artificial divide set up between students and teachers? How do we dismantle the hierarchies that keep students from being full agents in their own educations?

The technologies and bureaucracies of schooling attempt to flatten our differences—reducing teachers and students to rows in a spreadsheet and our work to columns. Teachers are meant to imagine that students are interchangeable—that whether they are food insecure, queer, or homeless is of no real consequence to a system (of grades, tests, and credentials) that attempts to rank them tidily against one another.

We need to find more ways to involve students in the design of their own learning, designing with students and not for them. We have to design for the least privileged, most marginalized students, the ones more likely to have felt isolated even before the pandemic: disabled students, chronically ill students, BIPOC students, international students, LGBTQ students, those facing food insecurity, etc. We need to write policies, imagine new ways forward, for students already struggling, already facing exclusion. 

At the same time, we need to find ways for institutions to better support educators, many of whom are working precariously. And, where they aren’t being adequately prepared or supported by our institutions, we need to find ways to balance the labor of teaching with the need for self-care. 

In this free 45-minute webinar, educator, author, and speaker Jesse Stommel will provide some starting points for thinking about creating powerful communities and cultures of care, both for students and for teachers. Join us!