Blog 5
Friday May 26th:
Woke up and started the day at Colegio Roosevelt. Room 218 started their morning with reading their book club books. As they were reading, I walked around and asked a few students to read out loud to me. What amazes me is to see how different each student reads. I had students reading slower than others, I had students that would make up the words as they read. It just amazes me to see the different levels that each of these students are at. After their art special, they headed to Counseling class. I was a bit confused as to what this exactly consisted of so I decided to attend this class. This class basically talks to students about different topics, for example, this topic was on how advertisements manipulate their viewers. The teacher tied this in with the bullying topic. Overall, I thought this class was super cool. I personally feel like not every child is educated on these topics, but rather are just told “Don’t be mean” whereas this class shows students what it’s like and what to look out for. After this class, they had snack and following snack was math. As I mentioned earlier, the students are multiplying and dividing fractions so this week was multiplying decimals and converting them into fractions. I walked around and helped a few students that needed help. Following the end of our day at Colegio Roosevelt, we came home and after dinner we decided to go out for a bit.
Saturday May 27th:
Today we woke up a bit later than the past week. This past week has been nothing but great but also very tiring. Today we went to El Agustino and celebrated the right to play. This was an event hosted by Encuentros for children and children from different districts come together to celebrate this day. There were different stations with different activities set up all around the area. I was participating in the jump rope station. We saw a couple of dances presented by the children such as an Afro Peruvian dance and break dance. After this, we visited Miraflores. We decided to go grab some lunch at Embarcadero 41 recommended by Lauren. Let me just tell you… Lomo Saltado is AMAZING. I had Fettuccini a La Huancaina Con Lomo Saltado and it was delicious! There’s a reason why Peru is named the food capital of South America. After this, we went to Manolo’s for some chocolate and cream filled churros. After this we headed back to Jesus Maria, and basically called it a night. I needed some time to recharge and catch up on sleep.
Sunday May 28th:
Woke up at 9am. It was a good sleep considering I fell asleep before 10:30pm. We had breakfast and headed out to Barranco. We initially were going to go eat at Burrito Bar but they didn’t open until 1pm and it was 11:30am, so we decided to eat at this cafe. We made sure to leave some room for dessert, so we went to Blu for some delicious gelato. YUM! Following this delicious dessert, we decided to go to some artisan market and looked around. After walking through, we decided to head home.
Something that I believe is essential in critical pedagogy is curiosity and questioning. A child is filled with curiosity about different things in the world. Like Freire emphasizes, it’s important that inside the classroom, students have the freedom to be curious. This curiosity leads into questioning. Freire calls this epistemological curiosity and it’s the idea that leads into deeper thinking. Its important that teachers give students opportunity to reflect and question on certain topics. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire states “…Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge”. He also states, “There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making.” Going based off these two quotes from Freire, these are essential in critical pedagogy.
Teachers should constantly be questioning their students. It’s not about having their students memorize the information but rather having them think critically about certain issues. In my fifth-grade classroom, students are currently in Book club groups and they are required to meet with each other four times and this past week, Mr. Stevens handed out a list of six topics to help guide them to create questions for each other. This is a good example of allowing students to dig deeper in the text and question each other.
Another thing that is essential is imagination and problem solving. I see this throughout the different grades at Colegio Roosevelt, for example, the Innovation fair is a great example of problem solving. This gave students to opportunity to create solutions to problems around their community. Also, the third-grade market is an example of imagination. Students had to use recycled materials to create something new, such as decorations, plants, and games.
Smiles,
Liz
