In this month’s column, I’d like to address the importance of connecting learning to the world that exists outside our classrooms, the curiosities that exist within the minds of students and the dialogical relation this approach encourages between the teacher and the student.

For several years, education has followed what Paulo Freire, in his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, called the ‘banking’ concept of education. In this system, teachers have ownership of knowledge and act as “depositors” of this knowledge, with the primary role of “filling” students who are “empty containers”. The more completely they fill the receptacle, the better teachers they are. The student records, memorizes, and repeats this content detached from reality, making it completely insignificant to them.

One can say that there has been a slight shift since, especially post pandemic, when educators across the globe realized that if it was content they were delivering, the internet did a better job. Thankfully, with ‘social-emotional learning’ becoming the new buzz word along with ‘cross-curricular integration’ and ‘application-based learning’, educators are now armed with new tools, techniques, and academic objectives that cover more ground than just memorizing content.

However, the relationship between the teacher and student still retains an imbalance of power, where the teacher holds pre-defined learning objectives (now more nuanced and layered than before) for their students as well as the sole authorship of the narrative in the classroom, leaving little room for the students to bring in their own curiosities of the world.

As someone who encourages educators to have conversations with children about ‘difficult or hush-hush topics’, I often get asked whether it is ‘age-appropriate’, a term that gives me immediate indigestion. Who decides what is appropriate for whom and when? This idea ties back into the banking notion of education where the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world enters into the child’s life, by making deposits of information which he or she considers to constitute true (and ‘appropriate’) knowledge.

This is why topics like war, violence, social justice, social and economic disparity, gender identity, politics, etc., stay out of the classroom, because adults think of them as ‘inappropriate’ even though children experience these issues in some form by simply co-existing in society as conscious beings.

In my limited but very experimental years of being in the classroom, I have experienced magic occur when academic objectives start growing tentacles and travel outside the classroom windows to rope the real world and its complexities in.

For instance, while studying about the Rann of Kutch in geography, we connected the importance of salt to Gandhi’s Dandi march (see, cross-curricular integration!) and also created opportunity for students to be curious about the salt on their dining table. We brought in images of salt being made in salt pans and genuine dialogue began when questions and curiosities came from them. ‘The workers don’t look happy.’ ‘They look like they are from South India…apart from Rann of Kutch where else are there salt pans?’ ‘Where do the workers live?’ ‘How many hours do they work for in one day?’ ‘What do they earn for such hard work?’ ‘Where does the salt I eat come from?’ We followed this up with an article published by PARI (People’s Archive of Rural India) that included interviews of the people who work there, and as the students read it, their questions were answered in the most authentic manner that could have been possible. Suddenly, students sitting in a suburb in Mumbai felt connected to salt makers in faraway Thoothukudi in Tamil Nadu.

Another example of dialogue that began a conversation was in a grade 8 English class while reading a story that had a reference to slavery. A student asked if slavery still existed, and the teacher immediately put a pause on the academic objective of the ‘English’ class and encouraged the discussion to see what the students thought modern-day slavery looked like. This led to the entire class opening up this topic and drawing parallels between slavery and caste-based occupations in India like conservancy work and garbage collection. We all create garbage. Someone clears it each day under exploitative circumstances. And yet, we don’t speak about it.

Having dialogue in the classroom is what Freire calls the ‘problem-posing education’ model, which responds to the essence of consciousness of both the teacher and the student equally, in their relations with the world. It is the antidote to the banking concept.

He writes, “through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student and student-teacher. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who while being taught, also teaches. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. In this process, arguments based on ‘authority’ are no longer valid; in order to function, authority must be on the side of freedom, not against it. Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the very ‘cognizable’ objects which in banking education are ‘owned’ by the teacher.”

I love reading these words over and over again. It is reassuring to know that ‘authority’ can be seen as positive. In a democracy, authority is supposed to be on the side of freedom, not against it. People give governments authority so governments can give them freedom. Maybe, that’s a conversation to start with students this month!