Much of Pedagogy of the Oppressed deals with the concept of false generosity, something I think many of us in the class had to get over when learning the module. False generosity is glamorous. It is attending galas to raise money against breast cancer or taking a photo next to a mural in Detroit after a “day of service.” The Pedagogy of Action is not. Perhaps the first step in approaching the module as a privileged University of Michigan college student was to destroy my expectations that had been built up around ideas of false generosity. There wouldn’t be photos, protests, or grand speeches. With POA, all of the glitz and glamour of “activism” sheds away and in its place, we find the module.
What was perhaps particularly interesting was the way in which my group’s privileged egos in particular were smashed minutes after teaching the module for the first time to the Z’s, in which they started given criticism and feedback on things we’d messed up, things that were unclear, and things we needed to do better in. Suddenly, we were no longer the teachers—we were the students, and I think that the Z’s prior knowledge of and experience with the module made this reversal of the banking system of education a starker contrast than it may have been with other groups. 
Another aspect of trust between the Z’s and myself was the mutual understanding that the module isn’t about AIDS or HIV. It’s not about medicine, or even about health disparities. The module is about The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, it is about using one’s privilege to fight. The module is about empowerment. After all, the class is called “Pedagogy of Empowerment,” isn’t it?
We were asked to speak to our own experiences, so we talked about how we’d grown, how the class had conscientized us, how we’d been nervous, excited, etc. We talked about a whole host of ways that we had changed throughout the semester, but what was almost completely lacking from the discussion was a reflection on what the communities we worked with had gotten out of our experience. It became rather clear that we had all been empowered in one way or another through the course, but it was unclear whether all of the community members we had worked with felt the same.
