Lesson Notes

What does it mean to unlock?

• What have you learned to “lock away”?
• In this topic, we review what we’ve learned to “lock away” by progressing though education systems that we may not always experience as safe learning environments in which we can trust our contributions will be received fairly and without consequence.
• We learn the institutional expectations of standardized education--that we must aim to match a standard of replicating institutionally accepted knowledge. We are conditioned to hide knowledge, thoughts, opinions that do not apply to standardized knowledge.
• Things we lock away may include ideas, thoughts, perspectives, opinions, knowledge from other sources—personal, familial, cultural and expereinces.
• Suddenly, though, as graduate students, the expectations change. We are expected to share our unique thoughts. There is no guidance to transition us into this.
• In this topic, we work on learning how to liberate those unique truths we've learned to lock away.
• This topic is as much about unlocking personal knowledge as it is about making your personal knowledge shareable in the academic world.

The common challenge

• Has there ever been something you wanted to say in a classroom setting, but you were too afraid of what your teacher or what your peers would say? Did it contradict anything in the learning materials? Did it contradict the teacher’s knowledge, or counter popular opinion? In the end, did you say it?
• In so many instances--and especially if you feel unsafe, unsupported-- it’s the more logical choice to lock away thoughts and perspectives that we may need to defend.
• It takes a safe and trustworthy learning environment for ideas to flow without fear, and most of us do not receive this from our earliest days in school, and all the way through higher education.
• We learn the institutional expectations of standardized education--that we must aim to match a standard of replicating institutionally accepted knowledge.
• We are conditioned to hide knowledge, thoughts, opinions that do not apply to standardized knowledge.
• Suddenly, as graduate students, though the expectations change. We are expected to share our unique thoughts. There is no guidance to transition us into this. In my program, it was just accepted that first year students were more quiet. Yes, eventually, we did learn by observing and being immersed in that seminar environment. But, I still question if it needed to (if it should be) that fraught, stressful and painful to just learn how to assimilate on our own.

The broader context

• This experience, though differing in historical moment, echoes with insights from Paolo Freire writing in the 1960s.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed
• Freire produced this from perspective in anti-colonial Brazil historical moment, and working as an educator with peasants. Developed philosophy of teaching in this historical moment, accounting for people entering education through oppressed subject experiences.
• He acknowledges that learning must look different for people--in a larger goal of liberating themselves, AND their oppressors. "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well" (Freire)
• One such condition he identified in educating oppressed people was to account for and allow for "Facing fear of freedom” (Freire, 35)
• Conscientização, meaning "critical consciousness": "The term consctentização refers to learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality." (Freire 35)
• The stakes: “If students are not able to transform their lived experiences into knowledge and to use the already acquired knowledge as a process to unveil new knowledge, they will never be able to participate rigorously in a dialogue as a process of learning and knowing.” (Interpretation of Freire by Donaldo Macedo, Introduction, 19)
• With this frame, we can think of what we’ve learned to lock away as a part of expereinces of oppression within the education systems we’ve gone through.
  

My personal journey

• I have experienced locking away and trying to unlock as a student and as a teacher.
• As a graduate student I was socialized into this--and it differed greatly from my socialization as an undergraduate, in which I was merited on my ability to reproduce/repeat THE answer we were given. And my intervention here in this block is to bring to light that our diversity of needs are not met in that process of socialization in which we become individualized thinking minds--it is largely in my expereince an unstructured and unreflective process that just "happens" along with formal graduate studies. But it is a part of our becoming as academics that also requires guidance.
• I suffered in an envirnment in which I suddenly had to un-condition myself from keeping quiet and telling people in authority only what they wanted to hear. It felt incredibly perilous to challenge my elder White male professor's opinion, no matter how kind he was. I was so very accustomed to locking these thoughts away. And where I was quiet, it looked instead that I was weak or lacking ideas--the seminar formation valued people who felt safe and confident enough to express their opinion.
• As a teacher, I recognized locking away from a different angle.
• I gradually noticed that my students were engaging me in such a way that they were looking for THE answer (THE right answer). I felt the contradiction between what I was trying to achieve in the class (personal knowledge) and what they students had come to expect of a university class.
• I explained to students that I see an essential part of entering the platform of academic discourse is to present/contribute YOUR answer, rather than THE answer.
• I realized as we set about to realize this, that it was necessary to first find out how to unlock that personal knowing that was so vaulted away. The most essential step here I found was to build a safe and trusting learning environment where students felt the could venture into the unknown.

Bibliography

Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (30th Anniversary Edition). Continuum.