My Experience With A Problem-Posing Model of Education

During high school, I experienced many different styles of teaching: boring, completely lecture-based chemistry classes to fully discussion-centered English classes, and everything in between. So, as I read Chapter 2 of Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Chapter 3 of Literacy of Promise, I was able to draw connections from my own learning experiences, especially with one teacher and class in particular.

Mr. Joo is probably my favorite teacher that I had in high school. During the fall semester, I took his Social-Cognitive Psychology course, which mostly adhered to Freire’s idea of the banking model of education. The class was sometimes hard to engage with because it primarily was made up of lectures designed to teach us about various psychological terms and their relevance.

However, Mr. Joo still stood out as a teacher to me for a couple of reasons. First, since the class was, after all, about how we think and process information, he made sure to help the class learn about various modes of studying in order to make the class easier for everyone, and he often had us students more or less create the lectures ourselves so that we better understood the material. Second, and more importantly, Mr. Joo is the nicest guy you will ever meet, regularly going out his way to engage with every student and truly humanize them, so that we all felt that we were an important part of our class, even though his style of teaching for the class may not have been particularly humanizing by Freire’s standards.

Because of his attitude towards his students, I was really excited to take Economics with him the following spring. Interestingly, Mr. Joo often told us throughout the semester that he was sort of learning economics with us; he studied psychology in college and had taught that course for over a decade before taking on an additional role with the economics class the previous fall. Talking to friends who had taken his economics class the previous semester, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the class evolved in his second semester teaching it.

While this class still contained some of the lecture elements of his psychology class, Mr. Joo allowed students to focus their attention on the specific topics that interested each of us the most. For example, we were assigned to listen to one episode of a certain economics podcast that we got to choose individually each week, and then simply to write a one-page reflection on it. Similarly, we spent a majority of class time learning about economic concepts by actually experimenting with them, such as with our semester-long stock market competition where we traded actual stocks with fake money.

Thanks to this shift towards a problem-posing style of education, I was able to learn more about concepts that interest me and exactly how they relate to the world, which I can’t say the same for my other classes about calculus or chemistry. I also felt more important and humanized because of the way Mr. Joo valued his students and our individual pursuits of knowledge. Even though my teacher was by no means an expert in economics, I had both a more enjoyable and interesting experience in his class because I felt more equal to him as Mr. Joo learned with me and about me.