In teaching there is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from.

I read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time in school as an impressionable and relatively naïve seventeen year-old, I still remember being stunned when my English teacher revealed to us that nothing in the novel had not happened somewhere or at sometime in our history. Now, almost twenty years later I am the teacher sharing this novel with my own students and it has lost nothing in its ability to captivate and educate young minds on who we were, who we are and who we could become.

This post will reflect upon an introductory lesson to The Handmaid’s Tale, hopefully my reflections will provide you with the guidance to make sure you can successfully deliver a lesson around one of its key themes – freedom.
For the lesson the class were put into pairs and provided with one of the significant quotations from the novel, “There is more than one kind of freedom. Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.”

In addition to this I set each pair a set of questions to answer:
1) What types of things in our western society do we have freedom to do?
2) What types of things do we have freedom from?
3) Are they any freedoms you would be willing to give up in order have greater protection or feel safer?

The aims of this lesson were for students to understand one of the key concepts of novel (the notion of freedom), critically engage with a contextual issue that inspired the novel and to participate in a meaningful debate around question number three.

After reflecting on this experience, I feel that the planning went well and the delivery went as planned, but not as well as I hoped. The Gibbs (1988) Reflective Cycle has enabled me to reflect successfully on this lesson and how it can be improved.

Firstly, let’s focus on the part of session that did not go as well as expected. Assessment for learning was undertaken through the use of questioning however, after reflecting on action (Schon, 1983) I discovered in this session that some students remained passive and struggled participate fully in the debate, while others remained stubbornly fixed to their way of thinking.

It is clear that I need to do more to develop these students’ critical faculties and encourage the concept that beliefs to not have to be held dogmatically. The novel The Handmaid’s Tale, will provide plenty of opportunities to put such thinking in to place and I hope to nurture students who can be open-minded, whole-hearted and intellectually honest (Tan, 2008.)

However, I highly recommend pursuing the debate format to any colleagues who are currently delivering the novel. The debate saw students discuss a range of ideas to create a safer society and the potential of such ideas to impose on our freedoms, such as: ID cards, curfews, re-introducing capital punishment and greater surveillance. In this section of the lesson it is crucial you avoid indoctrination and encourage critical thinking, I worked with the students to understand the nature and implications of the ideologies on parade; and in doing so engaged students in reflection upon their own ideological investment. (Lankshear and Mclaren, 1993). I achieved this by not offering my personal beliefs on the topics but rather asking the students to rationalise their opinion and allowing for counter arguments to be heard.

Inspired by Zare and Othman (2013), and reflecting upon the session I have discovered that debates assist with higher level of reasoning skills, increases generation of new ideas and increases self-esteem and confidence of my students. Zare and Othman support for debate in the classroom is one that reflects my pedagogical ethos as it creates a space for students to educate each other and moves away from didactic methods of passively absorbing information.

This session has revealed to me that when undertaken classroom debates, much like life outside of my classroom, there is more than one kind of freedom and finding the balance between ensuring my students have freedom to express themselves while having freedom from indoctrination will be crucial to their development.

Bibliography
Gibbs, G. (1988), Learning By Doing: A Guide to Teaching and Learning Methods. Oxford:Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic

Lankshear, C & McClaren, P., eds. (1993) Critical literacy: Radical and postmodernist perspectives. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Tan, C. (2008). Teaching Without Indoctrination: Implications for Values Education. Netherlands: Brill.

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books

Zare, P. and Othman, M. (2013) Classroom debate as a systematic teaching/learning approach. World Applied Sciences Journal, Vol.28, No.11, pp.1506-1513.