My attitudes and practice resembled the “banking education” method Freire (2000) mentioned in his book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It is a pedagogical approach in which teachers “deposit” knowledge into the “banks” of students’ brains, and where “the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are the mere objects” (p.73). The continued pattern of the class and my perception towards the students revealed the problems were not the students but instead my pedagogy. I was gratified by this understanding before actually delivering the lecture. The lecture was forcing the students to take a risk on creativity.

According to Freire, learning is fundamentally about naming the world in order to be able to transform it and create a new one (Freire, 2000). We develop our understanding and theory about the world to act upon this mandate, and then these actions transform the world; in response, our theories will develop and change in tandem. We begin to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in “the process of transformation” (Freire, 2000, p.12). 

As the art instructor of the group I took the role of the teacher who “teaches and the students are taught” (Freire, 2002, p.73). In order to contradict this attitude of the banking concept, I wanted to provide a learner-focused pedagogy that gave a chance for the students to narrate and visualize their experience. What I wanted to focus on in my new art teaching approach was to center the students’ interests over my chosen content for them to discover their own voices and express themselves freely beyond achieving “good” technique.

I believe my students and I are very close to achieving the second stage of the pedagogy of the oppressed—the humanist and libertarian pedagogy that was brought by Paulo Freire. According to Freire, “we all acquire social myths which have a dominant tendency, and so learning is a critical process which depends upon uncovering real problems and actual needs” (Freire Institute, n.d.). My previous art teaching was rooted in an ideology of oppression, and was suppressing my students from having the critical awareness and thinking process for themselves. In the second stage, “the reality of oppression has already been transformed, this pedagogy ceases to belong to the oppressed and becomes a pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” (p.54). After thorough reflections on my previous art teaching practice and “My Immigration” project, I was able to identify oppressive teaching approaches that I had before. In my future art teaching practice, I will value the knowledge I accumulated to confront how the students and I perceive the world, continuing to reimagine and expel the ideas developed in the old order. Just as bell hooks said, I hope for our intellect and our imaginations to forge new and liberatory ways of knowing, thinking, and being—to work for change.