For such a long time, educators and students were stuck in a traditional way of teaching and learning. The teacher would talk about a chapter while students would be following the content through a textbook and, eventually, one student gets a chance to speak. Courtney Cazden explains the concept of ‘‘IRE’’ (Initiate – Respond – Evaluate), (CAZDEN, 2001) and she says that: ‘‘in the classroom, by the nature of school as an institution, the default pattern of classroom discourse is IRE’’ (CAZDEN, 2001), which means students spend most of their school time being listeners, instead of being active participants of their own learning process.

The practice of seeing learners as coadjuvants has led them to a passive relation to knowledge. As Cope & Kalantzis affirm: ‘‘Students are configured as knowledge consumers more than they are knowledge producers. The moral of their learning is that they should comply with epistemic authority’’ (COPE & KALANTZIS, 2017, p.23). Students were supposed to listen to the authority – the teacher –, follow a textbook on the same page as everyone else and in case there was some extra time, they would be allowed to talk.

The characteristic of the teacher as a transmitor of knowledge has been explored by Paulo Freire in the ‘‘Banking’’ concept of Education, he says:

Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues comuniques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘‘banking’’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filling, and storing the deposits (FREIRE, 1970).

Therefore, education has changed a lot in the past few years and it will continue changing. If the world is going through transformations, so is the education. It is quite important to motivate the learner’s agency especially when it comes to the online environment. The traditional pedagogy might have worked in the past, however the contemporary society requires active learners who can produce, think and practice their citizenship more than just consuming knowledge.

REFERENCES

CAZDEN, Courtney B. 2001. Classroom Discourse: The Language of Teaching and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

COPE, B., and KALANTZIS, M. (2017). Conceptualizing e-learning. In: B. Cope and M. Kalantzis (Eds), e-Learning Ecologies. New York: Routledge.

FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. 1970. New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc.

You can also watch the following video in order to know more about Paulo Freire's concepts and life:

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