This week’s readings for Ways of Knowing introduced me to a lot of interesting ideas and got me thinking deeper about a lot of pedagogical practices. The chapter from Neha Vohra’s Teach for Arabia made me dissect what it really means to be enrolled in a satellite campus. I was thinking about the perception I have of certain colleges due to pop-culture. The first example that is coming to me right now is how Rory Gilmore goes to Yale in The Gilmore Girls, a show that I binge-watched over the summer after a recommendation by a good friend. What I learned about Yale from the show was that the prestigious piece of architecture was responsible for schooling predominantly white and rich students whose families had most likely attended Yale for generations. I wonder how much of this applies to Yale-NUS College, a liberal arts college collaboratively established in Singapore by Yale and National University of Singapore. Navigating school spirit might be confusing when you’re enrolled in a satellite campus. For example, the sentiment tied to a university’s building might not necessarily be shared by students enrolled in a satellite campus. It is not at all the fault of the creators of Gilmore Girls to depict Yale the way they did, because Yale-NUS was established in 2011, years after the show was broadcast. Besides, the picture the show painted might lack nuances, but it does hint at the privilege within academia. 

However, one thing that really stood out to me was the idea of a banking model in education disguised as a problem-posing education system. When I first read Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my brain was ready to accept that a binary exists where there are strict teachers who do not encourage student engagement and in juxtaposition, there are lenient teachers who enable discussion and analysis. In this scenario, the former is the banking model of education while the latter is the problem posing system. However, I realised that the two education systems might not simply exist in a binary, where one system is devoid of the other’s characteristics. A system might claim to be problem-posing and might present that way, however it might just follow the same foundational notions that the banking model follows. In this blog, I will talk about how there might be instances where problem-posing education is just the banking model watered down to become palatable for the current times. 

In such problem-posing systems, assignments might be more analytical with a smaller emphasis on statistics and facts, teachers might be more lenient, but the contents of the analysis might still be concrete and the students might still be treated as banks but this time for liberal arts and social sciences. Student participation might be encouraged as long as they very intelligently articulate what the correct answer is. 

The current political climate we live in yields a lot of performative activism and allyship. Inclusivity, diversity, and social justice are ideas that have become easy to commercialize and capitalize on. We see examples of this in the conduct of corporations and companies on the daily. Examples of this include greenwashing, which is a marketing spin that companies deceptively use to persuade consumers or prospects into thinking that their products are environmentally friendly (Watson, 2016). If performative progress is seen in other facets in modern times, why would it not be seen in pedagogical spheres?

An educational institution is essentially a company as well, which according to Friere is used as a tool to feed into a capitalist system and produce employees. And since social justice notions are used as a commercialization tactic, a new set of skills is being added to many job requirements. This includes soft skills such as communication, inclusivity, and social intelligence. Personally, in my country, companies have recently become more interested in hiring liberal arts graduates than before. So why wouldn’t education systems adapt to this change to produce an army of employees best suited to today’s requirements? 

 

References:

 

Freire, P. (1972). 

Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Vora, N. (2018). 

Teach for Arabia . 

Watson, B. (2016, August 20). 

The troubling evolution of corporate greenwashing. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/aug/20/greenwashing-environmentalism-lies-companies.