While reading Freire’s essay about “banking,” my mind kept recalling alternative education curriculums, specifically Montessori schools. Montessori schools have a student interest driven approach to education, where the student experiments with what they wish to learn. They are not bound by a strict curriculum full of tests and grading. Not surprisingly (or perhaps surprising to some), in a 2006 study published in Science, researchers found that students who attended a Montessori type school had “better social and academic skills.” Students who pursued their own interests, free of being judged by tests, interacted better with other students, improving their social skills, and were able to perform better academically. Perhaps this is because of their use of what Freire called “invention and re-invention.” Freire states that this is what leads to knowledge, so the students freedom to address their own interests leaves room for invention and re-invention as they do not have to always work towards the “correct” structure so as to pass the class. Narrowing the scope a bit to look at writing, the study found that students in the Montessori school were “significantly more creative and [used] significantly more sophisticated sentence structures.” However, in regards to grammar, both sets of students “scored similarly on spelling, punctuation and grammar, and there was not much difference in academic skills related to reading and math.” Grammar, syntax, diction, and the rest are mostly, in my opinion, memorized structures. By that I mean, you must know the rule. One can stumble upon the rules by reading various works however. It does not necessarily need to be taught. This idea is supported by the similar scores by both student participants, where one group was taught and the other, without exams, learned through less teaching and more exploration. The greatest part though comes from the increased creativity by those in the Montessori school group. Creativity is something I’ve noticed lacking in my students essays. Most of them have the exact same conclusions and use nearly the exact same examples (though, I do acknowledge the writing prompt can be limiting). Exploration leads to better creativity, as per the study.
I am of the opinion that the Montessori curriculum is perhaps the better way to teach. The “banking” method deprives students of passion, and society stigmatizes passions that are not part of the traditional structural teaching curriculum. How does this apply to our ENC 1101 classes though? I believe by letting students explore their own topics, whether they be political or social, within the humanities or the sciences, they will learn to write a better essay. The current sequence in our classrooms puts walls around the students’ ability to think about the prompt creatively by actually providing a prompt, forcing specific readings, and also not allowing outside sources. In regards to the lack of outside sources, I’ve had students in my class want to take an anthropological approach and even a historical analysis approach to the essay. However, since outside sources are off limits, they too are limited and confined within this certain small set of ideas. Breaking through the barriers would result in them creating interesting essays with outside sources that are, unfortunately, penalized because of their interests. The pedagogy for the class seems more akin to banking and modeling than it does to expression. We teach them about the essay as a structure of writing, and then use the provided readings as models for this structure. It discourages the “invention and re-invention” that Freire says leads to knowledge.
However, one can possibly say that being filled with facts through the banking method could possibly lead to knowledge. It then would be on the student to take the facts that they have memorized and transform them into usable knowledge. This would require students to know how to critically think. How does one teach critical thinking then? I’m still working on it.
Edit: I’ve included a link to an article by the University of Virginia that discusses that study mentioned above.
http://news.virginia.edu/content/montessori-education-provides-better-outcomes-traditional-methods-study-indicates