Solidarity

I keep coming back to the same idea: each person as the expert of their own life. Only the individual can say what they feel, want, need, what’s best for them, why, and who they are. To apply this to the question of the most powerful impact of a first-year writing course (or any course, for that matter), is to have only the conclusion that the student feels that it was beneficial to them in some way. I like to think I’m a far cry from idealistic but maybe this worldview is in itself idealism? But at the same time, I recognize the impossibility of that ideal. Is it ever going to be for everyone? Can’t we only do our best to make the space for each person to gain their something, and give them the space to decide if they want to get something or not, and if so, what that means for them and what they’ll do with that?
The phrase “powerful impact” interests me. Who defines this? Who is impacting whom? Whose power? I don’t think it would come as a surprise that I find reading Freire to be affirming. To think of asserting our idea of an ideal impact, we perhaps impart our fixed worldview onto others. Is that banking masquerading as woke? How do we avoid that? In trying to get at a liberating educational atmosphere, Freire writes:

In problem-posing education, people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.

This, I think, blends well with my concept of people as the experts of their own realities. We should then position ourselves in solidarity with them, in partnership, not separate. And not separate from where we are (“the movement must begin with the human-world relationship”). If we’re saying, “but in the real world…” we’re “mythicizing reality,” as Freire puts it. And if we’re staring with what we think the student needs, we’re banking. But how do we start at this point in a first-year writing course?

Our students are most likely coming in from a banking model of education, in particular because they were youth and youth in our culture aren’t typically treated as though they have agency. So when I ruminated previously on the atmosphere of the classroom seeming to have an inescapable feeling of teacher-as-authority, student-as-compliant, I think that is why. I begin to think that all I would like, in my idealistic vision of a classroom, is for this power dynamic to be dissolved and to come to each course and each class in solidarity and move forward together.

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