Vice Versa: Teacher-Students & Student-Teachers

In his article, The Standards of Critical Digital Pedagogy, Sam Hamilton explains how conventional educational standards are limiting potential learning environments.

He raises an interesting point when referring to Paulo Freire:

 As Paulo Freire writes in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction” (72). Freire then unsettles the teacher/student binary, casting classroom occupants as teacher-students and student-teachers. This recasting of students’ and teachers’ subject positions does more than merely suggest teachers have plenty to learn and students have plenty to teach; it’s an early step in moving both students and teachers toward a critical consciousness of their position and possibilities in an oppressive system of education; both teachers and students are confined by their defined roles, limited to be either bankers making knowledge deposits or empty bank vaults passively receiving those deposits. It effectively explodes the most immediate and oppressive power dynamic with which students and teachers are aware: namely, the dynamic between teachers and students as teachers and students.

This argument takes me back to a previous blog post in which I argued that learning in a 21st century cannot be successful with a system that dates back to when this technologically-driven generation's parents were in school. The idea then to create a new balance of student-teachers and teacher-students and disrupting the age-old, standardised power balance within the classroom makes perfect sense.

Allowing learning to take place within a technologically mediated self-directed distance allows for new ways as well as unique ways of learning. These ways of learning of course not only referring to textbooks and teachers, but media and technologically related materials as well as peers and social influences. This way of learning allows the flow of ideas and practices to be shared, experienced, tried and tested. Throughout my own school years I have come across many individuals who are not able to take in and understand information through the specific way it is presented - a common problem in the standard schooling system. This new suggested way of schooling is the perfect way to solve this specific problem and is clear in the workings of The Independent Project.

As argued before, I believe it is of utmost importance to allow a new generation to learn through the media that is already so deeply integrated within their daily lives. Now, why not allow them to teach the old, standard education system a thing or two?