FROM THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED TO THE PEDAGOGY OF THE DISTRESSED OR THE BULLY/WIMP SYNDROME

The traditional teaching approach that Paulo Freire called the “banking model of education” was seriously challenged by all the pedagogy of the 60s and 70s, which proposed new alternative models that focused far more on the learner. Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, later utilised by Jane Tompkins in her essay “Pedagogy of the Distressed”, clearly points out the disadvantages of over rigid and authoritarian didactic styles, and proposes alternative dialogical and interactive methods. But just as these student-centred approaches started to be widely used, Gerard Graff highlighted their fundamental limits and suggested the mixing and positive integration of the two methods in an interdisciplinary perspective with a continuous exchange amongst teachers. Graff’s indications, by resolving the basic dichotomy between the two didactic approaches, has constituted the foundations and the essential premise for all present day pedagogical research, giving rise to the positive period of the so called “blues approach”.