Paulo Freire's Banking Model Of Education

This project was built upon many different educational philosophies. The primary building block was Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy, which centers on the belief that education is a dialogical process through which oppressed populations can find empowerment to move toward equality. In particular, Freire opposed what he described as the “banking model” of education:

In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those who they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. (Freire, 2000, p. 72)

The banking model has the potential to become especially

Geneva Gay (2002) defines this as “using the cultural characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively” (p. 106). In essence, the teachers become responsible for connecting students’ lived experiences with the subject matter they will encounter. Whereas most material that is prescribed is oriented towards white, cisgender, heterosexual male ideals, culturally responsive teaching attempts to make space for all members of the community. The shift away from this “default” allows students from other backgrounds to connect to the material in an equitable fashion. Villegas and Lucas (2007) explain that students will already bring a base of knowledges and experiences, and that a teacher’s role is to “support students’ learning by helping them build bridges between what they already know about a topic and what they need to learn about it” (p. 2). The teachers must closely examine the communities their students come from, and examine the ways in which they are already interacting with their students. Even simple classroom communication styles can differ. For instance, students of color often come from communities where communication is dialogical, and may be less accustomed to having someone lecture at them without being given an opportunity to respond (Gay, 2002). Knowing that

Brooks and Thompson (2005) explain that social justice can be either cultivated or suppressed in the classroom by teachers who find themselves in the midst of a “difficult” scenario. By refusing to discuss complex issues such as racism, sexuality or abuse, they refuse to acknowledge that these issues are aspects of their students’ realities, and thus deny them the opportunity to move forward and upward. Responding to these issues is, in fact, key to Gay’s (2002) elements of culturally responsive teaching. She describes the ways in which schools fail at designing culturally relevant curricula, which include glossing over uncomfortable or unpleasant issues and historical atrocities. She argues that culturally responsive teachers must directly address these issues so as to not erase them, and therefore the lived and historical circumstances of their students. The fact of the matter is that much of medicine has a long record of exploitation, especially of women of color, which has created a deep mistrust within nonwhite communities (LaVeist, 2005). This is a key cultural element to the areas in which I teach, and to fail to address it would be a disservice to my students. The required learning and the social and historical backgrounds are inexorable, and focusing purely on the academic requirements “does the most harm to students of low socioeconomic