Silencing Teachers & Freire 2nd Letter

park — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:51:20 +0000

After reading Jaeger’s article, I had to remind myself that I was writing an article about our democratic nation, the US of A, and NOT a communist regime or Brazil in Freire’s day. How can the government and/or your administration mandate what material and in what manner you can teach our student? It’s propaganda in the schools; you are given a “script” to follow. How can you come into my classroom and tell me what I can and cannot say and do? How can you stifle the creativity and the interaction between the reader and the text, for example? “Reading [is] a composition between reader and writer in which the most profound significance of the text is also the creation of the reader…Reading also [is] a dialogic experience” (Freire, p. 55). And where we have the freedom of speech, if you don’t follow the status quo, you’ll get plucked up from your position and moved elsewhere. How can this injustice be? How can we be taking steps backwards? Like everything, there is no one answer to life. It takes a combination of instructional strategies to reach our students so how can those in power dictate what we do, especially when they are policy makers and not educators? I think unlike Freire and Jaeger, I do have fears that are ”concrete”; I hope that if in such a situation, I will not let others tell me what I can and cannot do or say,,.that I will not be “paralyzed” (Freire, p. 50).

Jen Park » Scripted Reading

Silencing Teachers & Freire 2nd Letter