PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED: PAULO FREIRE’S PEDAGOGIC CRITIQUE OF POETRY-1 SYLLABUS AT MATERS LEVEL (ENGLISH) AT UNIVERSITY OF SWABI, PAKISTAN

Abstract

This paper aims to evaluate the students’ feedback of Poetry course. This course includes a total of thirty-four poems of prominent poets ranging from the 14^th century till18^th century. The course contents are annexed as A. This study will evaluate the pedagogical appropriateness of the overall course and with a zero lecture in the course to critically evaluate the pedagogical appropriateness of the following four poems in particular. The study also aims at the evaluation of the course design to see whether management of course curriculum has an impact on the course overall success. The study applied the theory of ‘Pedagogic Critique’ presented and explicated in the work of Paulo Freire titled as ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire, 2000)’.  Freire explains that power dynamics behind everything determines the way how any educational course and setting get underway and proceeded. Books, according to him, are never rated beyond their scope until they are associated with their expected readers and audience (Patton, 2017).  The study finds out a mixture of complicated feedback from the students who appeared in their MA English course. The study was devised through a questionnaire indexed at the end of the paper. Their feedback was analysed and the conclusion was made. Most of the students through a resultant questionnaire were unable to reply exactly to the course they read and some of the students could not appropriately connect their initial aptitude to the courses they read and what they had initially antipiated. The study also finds out that some of the students selected their course vaguely without having any firsthand knowledge about they would later on study. Prologue to the Canterbury Tales were considered to be most complicated course since it has a little complicated archaic diction, whereas Spencer’s Faerie Queene was considered through a feedback to be outmoted and less universally applied to modern teaching practicum and literary pragmatics. Most pragmatic and creative work that was recommended and liked by both the teachers and studetns was ‘Paradise Lost’. The study eventually conludes that the potery-1 course should stand modied and there is a lot of room for research on this aspect. The course needs an overhauling to better engineer it for the students’ comprehension and understability.

Keywords: Pedagogy; poetry; syllabus; Pakistan