nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

and experiences for acquiring, enhancing, or making changes in one’s knowledge,skills, values, and worldview. 3Questions reflecting on definitionsCan aims and habits live on if they are passed on rigidly, without being questioned?How can students learn knowledges of past generations in order tomake a change to their own knowledges, values and skills without shapingthat information according to their existing understanding and experiences?How can the teacher know of the students’ existing understanding other thanby listening to them? How can students find their voice to express their understandingif lined up in a formation that does not come from them?What constitutes a good teacher?I strongly believe that facilitating creativity and critical engagement are essentialfor any form of teaching. Learning should be a tool for emancipationand I see it to be the teacher’s role to provide an environment for the studentsto be able to access and nurture their own potential, as individuals as well asthe whole group.Pedagogy of the Oppressed(…) education makes sense because women and men learn that throughlearning they can make and remake themselves, because women and men areable to take responsibility for themselves as beings capable of knowing – ofknowing that they know and knowing that they don’t. (Paulo Freire) 4There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education eitherfunctions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generationsinto the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it,or it becomes the ‘practice of freedom’, the means by which men and womendeal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformationof their world. (Richard Shaull drawing on Paulo Freire) 5EtymologyEducation is to lead forth/ to draw out: from educe to ex [out], ducere [to lead].Education as a practice of change, as a practice of engaging with knowledgeand using it to create knowledge. The function of the teacher to facilitatea process of drawing out that knowledge, to lead forth the process ofcreating knowledge. The body of the teacher as the head of a class, lining up171