authentic thinking

A careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship at any level…involves a narrating subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students)… Narration (with the teacher as narrator) leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into “containers,” into receptacles to be “filled” by the teacher…(However) one must seek to live with others in solidarity. One cannot impose oneself, nor even merely co-exist with one’s student. Solidarity requires true communication... The teacher's thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the student's thinking. Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication.

[excerpts from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, original publication 1970]


My thesis research about the duality of relationships, specifically between artist and ‘non-artist,’ had tangentially placed Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed in my hands. My dissertation suggests that spatial design can enable reciprocal relationships between distinct identities: the painter-pediatrician exchange and the film maker-factory worker bond will be facilitated by the physical space. Potentially, these diverse relationships not only interact, but engage in a fluid, shared dialogue of “authentic thinking.” Behaving in synergetic interactions, the relationships never classify roles such as “depository” or “depositor.” Each has as much to gain, as he/she has to give. Together, we persist in a mutual “naming of the world.”

My thesis coursework ended and my theories about education were immediately tested in an intensive, in-residence workshop at California Polytechnic State University. As a teacher’s assistant, my position required mentoring the architectural interest of forty-four high school students. With an intention to experientially share architecture as a career-path, the workshop presents program with a learn-by-doing maxim. Projects were issued by senior faculty and the students were given time and space to develop physical, 3D responses to the prompts. Deliberate experimentation was encouraged. Working with two other recent graduates, I guided these novice designers through the intimidating world of glue, chipboard, dried spaghetti, and wire mesh.

In order to prepare for the teaching position, I thought back to the strategies of my mentor educators. I realized that the most challenging and beneficial instruction came from prompts for exploration versus the dictation of theory. Posing inquiries actually instigates the sharing of ideas. It places faith in “humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human.” It humbly identifies that content evolves when all agree to share in its development. Thought, therefore, “is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all.”

The challenge as an assistant teacher, or facilitator, actually was in the liberation of these chained minds, those that were in the act of becoming hollow so as to receive the contents of narrating teachers. The first step involves convincing these “oppressed” youth that their words and thoughts are not only sensible, but actually indisputable and indispensable. Therefore, it is my responsibility as a citizen of humanity to engage in this reciprocity. A narrative role not only dehumanizes and oppresses the group seated before me, but it also renders me as a mechanical entity. As Freire solicits, the “quest for mutual humanization” is a horizontal partnership. His pedagogy is what I tried to share with my workshop group and what I would hope to continue with young New Yorkers. The invitation to engage in dialogue not only promotes exchange. It promotes the creative freedom to wander into the dumpster for scraps of plastic and re-emerge with a confident objective.