Contact Zone

Mary Louise Pratt wrote “Arts of the Contact Zone” which is a place where you learn differently and everybody interprets things in a different way and through different ways like her son made a connection to the world through baseball cards.  Also the Contact Zone you can be in a group of people and talk about the positive and the negative aspects of each person’s beliefs and religion without fighting for some people will still get mad but it is a way that made it where nobody stayed mad over the subject.

Now I am going to use Pratt’s Contact Zone to talk to you about the Hebdo Attack in Paris.  The attack was made by two Islamic terrorist who forced their way into a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist in Paris and shot eleven people and wounded eleven more.  During the attack the shooters where shouting "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is [the] greatest").

Some of the cartoonist rendering of the attack look like they mostly go off the saying that the “pin is mightier than the sword” or in this case the gun.  One of the cartoons is a line of people on the left side trying to talk to god who is sitting on a chair that is on a cloud on the right hand side and is on a blue background which could stand for the sky.  They seem like they are trying to get his attention but all they are doing is giving him a headache.

Another cartoon is where the two shooters are in the building that they just done shooting up and the shooter on the right hand side is holding a pin and the one on the left is asking “What is this little weapon that hurt us so much”.  Which is showing that the cartoons that Hebdo where making where offensive to the Islamic people to make them thank that the only way to make them stop is to go in and shoot the Hebdo staff.  In the Contact Zone that Pratt wrought there was a class where most people where from different backgrounds and they talked about the different background with made some people mad but they never did resort to valance for when you are in the Contact Zone you can put up with it for you were also show the others the faults in their religion or other beliefs.

This brings me to another cartoon where the shooter on the left is saying “He drew first” and the person he shot is lying face down on the ground after being shot. This one is also saying that if the Hebedo staff did not make those cartoons they would not of came and shot them for they thought they could end the cartoons by using violence and not just asking them to stop in one way or another.  Which I thank builds off of another cartoon that is a bunch of religious leader sitting around and reading “The big fat book of offensive religious cartoons” Now this cartoons is like the Contact zone for they religious leaders are not killing the person that wrought the book but are laughing together at the cartoons that are about their religion and that of everybody else’s religion and they are just sitting around and laughing together not shooting each other.

So to me most of the cartoons where based on the theme that the pin is mightier than the sword which all of the valance could have been averted if they just took the lime to look at the other religious cartoons and not just the ones about them and see that they were not the only ones being made fun of.

Paulo Freire

I am going to talk to you about Paulo Freire’s paper called The “Banking” concept of education.  In this paper Freire is against the Banking concept and I agree with him that it is not a very good way to educate new generations and getting them ready for the road ahead of them and for real life.  The Banking system as it is in the paper says that the teachers give information for the students to memorize and file away for later use.  I am more inclined towered the way of learning that Freire proposed in the writing which is how some of the Greek philosophers taught there students by using logic and asking questions about real world problems and doing activities based on real world application.

I am inclined to thank this way for after reading the paper and taking experiences that I have had as a student that the best way to help someone learn is to show them how it is going to apply to them in the future.  The reasons why I am do not agree to the Banking system which in its defense a lot of people can get better grades by just memorizing a bunch of information then relating it back to the teacher on a quiz or test.  I am one of the people that has a hard time memorizing facts that I have no clue on how they will relate to me later in life in other words making myself be a machine by just absorbing information and filing it away as Freire would say.

Freire says that the teachers should teach the students and the students should teach the teachers for the teachers to not know everything.  I agree that this is the best way for if the teachers are to get better at teaching the next group if kids they will have to learn from the students on what they did not know and how to improve on making the class more enjoyable and be able to be understood later in life.  This also goes with the concept that Freire put in that to be human the teachers can not thank they know everything for nobody does know everything and the student are not just machines that can be programed with a bunch of knowledge for that will not humanize the at all if will be making them more like slaves to themselves.

In my experience most teachers combine the methods that Freire says and the banking system which Freire did say is what some teachers do and that is a step closer to making the students more human but they are still robots just robots that have a little bit more free will which is what make us human in the first place is that we have free will.  Without us thanking through the problems that are presented to us that we are not able to figure out how to solve by using our minds for the only thing the teachers taught us was a bunch of facts and not how to solve the problem we lose our humanity for then we are just machines and machines can not figure out what to do unless a human programs it on what exactly to do in the situation but if we where taught how to solve problem then we would be using our own minds to figure it out and be free to succeed or fail at a human by using the problem solving skills that the teachers showed us and by asking questions on how the real world works.