I find that Freire and Hairston’s concerns about teaching come down to the same general anxiety: in the power struggle of educating, how do we allow students to be in control of their own learning? I personally had an interesting introduction to Freire; I had to read and write a paper on his theories for a sophomore composition course. Although I found it interesting, the teacher of the course seemed to take Freire’s words seriously. He was incredibly hands off in the teaching of writing – almost to a fault. Other than this one class, my experiences of being taught writing have been much more of the “old paradigm.” Typical examples include the use of fill in the blank bubble outlines, formulaic styles of paper development, and overly critical grammar Nazis who mark everywhere on your paper with little explanation.
My concern as a new GTA becomes, then, how do I take these theoretical frameworks of shifting towards the new paradigms put forward by Freire and Hairston and put them into practical application? Hairston uses the phrase “untrained teaching assistant” (79) and teachers who feel “insecure and angry because they know they are teaching badly” (81). This describes me perfectly, but without external pressures to change this system, I don’t see how there can be a full shift away from the old paradigm. As a confused teaching assistant with little guidance in the practical application of teaching writing, am I not doomed to a) fail at my attempts to follow a paradigm that I don’t have experience learning from, and/or b) fall back on the old paradigm because it is the only one I know how to apply in the classroom, therefore pass these bad practices onto my students and the next generation of confused teachers?