Nothing extraordinary happened today, so here’s a review of one of the books I finished back in August, Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess, lent to me by Sherrill. This was only the second book I’ve read about pedagogy, so I have no choice but to compare it with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (a very different approach). In doing so, I’ll be committing a bit of a Boss Baby fallacy, be hopefully something useful can be reached.
Teach like a Pirate is mostly a book about performance. There is surprisingly little information about pirates (turns out it’s an acronym). Burgess is concerned with how to engage students, and his answer is (in short) to treat the classroom as a circus (a comparison he himself makes). The teacher performs in a high-energy, ultra-entertaining manner, and the student will be so enthralled that they’ll learn on accident. Alongside the performances are a number of wacky games and activities, which I think probably represent his work at its best. Studies on neuroplasticity have found that people learn best when their brain is forced to make new connections, ie mixing multiple modes of sensory information and motor activity. Burgess suggests that most teachers who fail do so because they are boring; young people have many things competing for their attention, and teachers must rise to the occasion by making classes more fun and entertaining.
I have no doubt that Burgess is an effective teacher, but I felt the book was lacking in terms of underlying theory. It provides an engaging how-to, without examining questions of why or what, ie, What is the goal of education? What is the role of the teacher and the student? How should classes be structured so as to achieve this goal?
Paulo Freire was a different kind of educator. A Christian and a Marxist, Freire’s educational praxis was underpinned by explicitly political aims. He rose to prominence for his creation of cultural circles, a sort of democratic classroom, where adult farmhands were taught to read. When his methodology was being developed, literacy was still a legal requirement to vote in Brazil; thus, for Freire, the political character of education was unquestionable and obvious. He was imprisoned, and lated exiled from Brazil following the 1964 military coup (backed by the US government) which overthrew the previous, democratically-elected government .
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his most famous book, was written in Bolivia and published in 1968. It is more a work of political theory than an educational manual, and seeks to bridge the divide between the oppressors and oppressed of society through education. Freire criticized what he calls the “banking model of education”, where students are treated as piggy banks, to be filled up with facts, in the hopes that some of those facts may one day accrue interest and give birth to new facts. This model, he argues, reinforces old hierarchies of oppression. Students learn that knowledge is a gift, generously handed down from those who have more, and it is the role of the student to shut up and pay attention. This cultivates a feeling of helplessness, detachment, and alienation, because the students are not part of the knowledge-production process. Freire’s alternative is the “problem-posing model”, a classroom based on dialogue and discussion, in which the students and teachers collaborate to explore themes and search for answers to collective problems. Knowledge is not purely the domain of the teacher, but also the student, and by sharing their knowledges in dialogue, the two work together in the production of new knowledge, thereby empowering the student. Students who see themselves as part of the knowledge-production process learn to take pride in their creativity, connect the classroom with outside experience, and seek solutions to the problems of the world around them.
Freire makes no reference to curriculum and shies away from specific examples. For him, all this should be shaped by the particular circumstances and desires of the locality. This is both a strength and a weakness; while Pedagogy of the Oppressed provides an excellent theory for empowerment through education, it gives almost nothing in terms of concrete examples to work from.
Teach like a Pirate provides a way of engaging students, but occasionally, it seems like Burgess, a history teacher, prefers to hand down ‘the facts’ from on high, teaching history for its own sake, rather presenting it as a tool for students to use. Pedagogy of the Oppressed lays out interesting ideas about education, but in its radicalness, it can be difficult to envision in practice.
To take the best of both in my own work means engaging students on their own terms. I try to approach English-learning not as a practice in itself, but as a medium for discussing other topics. We learn English so we can bridge the knowledge gap between us. Grammar and vocabulary are tools which allow us to share thoughts with greater precision. I am lucky (although it does create a lot of extra work) in that my classes do not have a very strict curriculum. There are some grammar things that I must teach, but otherwise, I try to let the students guide our topics of study and discussion, and create situations in which they are involved in the process of creating and sharing knowledge. If we ever get a chance to work in person, I would like to incorporate more role-playing activities, so that students can move beyond just discussing ideas to actually embody and act them out. As it stands now, I teach via Zoom, mostly using PowerPoints, and I fear I often lapse into the banking model, lecturing rather than discussing. In part, I blame the medium; Zoom is good for lecturing, but difficult for creative collaboration. But beyond this, it is difficult to break away from the banking model because it is so ingrained in the American educational system, and by extension, my own experiences. Envisioning a more empowering form of education is hard, and putting it into practice is even harder, so I fall back on what is easy and familiar. Especially when kids are hesitant to participate. I think my biggest takeaway from Teach like a Pirate was that, if you want kids to be excited, you have to be excited first. If you want them to open up, you have to open up first. And I’m not yet fully confident in what I’m doing, so my students will reflect that. I’ve gotten somewhat comfortable planning a certain type of mildly-successful lesson, which means it’s time to start interrogating my methods, to keep what works and scrap what doesn’t. I have a lot of freedom over my work here, and I want to make the most of it, for my sake and the students’.
“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” – Gilles Deleuze
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