Damn! My students worked the hell out of Freire.

Sometimes there are days when I am just blown away by the students here and Wednesday was one of those days.

We started with a qw since they were turning in project I.3 which was a revision of I.2. I asked them to write about the experience of writing the essay, the challenges and successes. I also asked them to describe what, if anything, they learned from doing a multi-draft process. (Students ended up writing about this in interesting ways: all found it helpful, most had never done this before.)

Next, I talked about how Freire is an example of a highly abstract or theoretical essay. I talked about using keywords as a strategy for reading theory. I also talked about how we might note that keywords are a major writerly move in theoretical writing.

I put the following keywords on the board and told them I took them from their qws on Monday:
banking concept, problem-posing education, human, consciousness, oppression/freedom, teacher-student relationship.

I then had the students get into pairs or groups of 3 and pick one of these keywords. Their group had to define the concept, have places to take us to in the text related to it, analyze these textual examples, and connect the concept to their experiences or the other readings we have done. All the keywords had at least 1 group working on them; some had several separate groups. After 20 minutes, we reformed as a big circle and they talked about what they did. It was amazing.