It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at “other people’s children” and see damaged

It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at “other people’s children” and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them.

-Lisa Delpit

Delpit, Lisa (2006-08-01). Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom . Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Controversies

and Power

Divides Between Faculty

• Delpit discusses the imbalance between minority educators and white middle class educators. There is a lack of research to support those minority educators trying to get their point across of how to educate minority students. – Keynote speech at the ethnographic conference

“Worldviews of those with privileged positions are taken as the only reality, while the worldviews of those less powerful are dismissed as inconsequential.”

Delpit, Lisa (2006-08-01). Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (p. 47). Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.


• Delpit points out a problem of majority educators not heeding the advice and comments from minority educators. – Comments from a black woman principle

• “And finally, we must learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness.”


Delpit identifies 5 issues of power:1. Issues of power are enacted in classrooms. 2. There are codes or rules for participating in power; that is, there is a “culture of power.” 3. The rules of the culture of power are a reflection of the rules of the culture of those who have power. 4.If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. 5. Those with power are frequently least aware of - or least willing to acknowledge - its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.



Divide Between Teacher and Student

• There are more minority students than minority educators.– “the turn of the century will find up to 40 percent

nonwhite children in American classrooms. Yet the current number of teachers from nonwhite groups threatens to fall below 10 percent”


Deficit Thinking

• L: Anthony told me that he liked school and that his favorite thing in his class was group time.

• C: That’s amazing, since he can’t sit still in it. He just says anything sometimes. In the morning he’s OK; after nap he’s impossible.

• L: He’s really talking more, it seems!• C: He’s probably never allowed to talk at home. He needs

communicative experience. I was thinking of referring him to a speech therapist. He probably never even got to use scissors at home.

• L: He told me about his cousin he plays with after school. It seems he really does have things to talk about.

• C: It’s unfortunate, but I don’t think he even knows what family means. Some of these kids don’t know who their cousins are and who their brothers and sisters are.

Stereotyping

TEXT: Yesterday I washed my brother’s clothes.STUDENT’S RENDITION: Yesterday I wash my bruvver close. The subsequent exchange between student and teacher sounds something like this: T: Wait, let’s go back. What’s that word again? [Points at washed.] S: Wash. T: No. Look at it again. What letters do you see at the end?You see “e-d.” Do you remember what we say when we see those letters on the end of a word? S: “ed” T: OK, but in this case we say washed. Can you say that? S: Washed. T: Good. Now read it again. S: Yesterday I washed my bruvver…T: Wait a minute, what’s that word again? [Points to brother.] S: Bruvver. T: No. Look at these letters in the middle. [Points to th.] Remember to read what you see. Do you remember how we say that sound? Put your tongue between your teeth and say /th/…

Pronunciation vs. Understanding

Different Spectrums of Thinking• Indirect vs. Direct Authority– “Isn’t it time for your bath?” – “Boy, get your rusty behind in that bathtub.”

• Conservative vs. Liberal Views– Educators are focused on teaching “fluency” and are

not developing the basic skills. In reality the students are very much fluent, yet lack the basic skills.

– The conservative end of the spectrum emphasizes traditional teaching where as the liberal takes the stance of completely teaching culture. Both are flawed.

“Progressive white teachers seem to say to their black students, ‘Let me help you find your voice. I promise not to criticize one note as you search for

your own song.’ But the black teachers say, ‘I’ve heard your song loud and clear. Now, I want to

teach you to harmonize with the rest of the world.’

Lessons and

Anecdotes

Think about it…

Ineffective Teaching Methods

• A students reaction:• “I didn’t feel she was teaching us anything. She

wanted us to correct each other’s papers and we were there to learn from her. She didn’t teach anything, absolutely nothing…When I told this gentleman that what the teacher was doing was called a process method of teaching writing, his response was, “Well, at least now I know that she thought she was doing something. I thought she was just a fool who couldn’t teach and didn’t want to try.”



“One young man said that he had dropped out of high school because he failed the exit exam. He noted that he had then passed the GED without a problem after three weeks of prep. He said that his high school English teacher claimed to use a process approach, but what she did was hide behind fancy words to give herself permission to do nothing in the classroom.”



• Delpit had a Native American college student submit a paper with poor sentence and paragraph structure, so much so that the message of the paper was lost. As Delpit began to discuss this paper with colleagues and was astonished by the explanation she received.


• “iz” Language activity

• PhD Students

“iz”

Effective Teaching

• 1. Good teachers care whether students learn. They challenge all students, even those who are less capable, and then help them to meet the challenge.

• 2. Good teachers are not time-bound to a curriculum and not move on to new subject matter until all students grasp the current concept.

• 3. Good teachers are not bound to books and instructional materials, but connect all learning to “real life.”

• 4. Good teachers push students to think, to make their own decisions.

• 5. Good teachers communicate with, observe, and get to know their students and the students’ cultural background.

Cultural Relativism• Cultural Relativism vs. Assimilationist Schooling – Assimilationist Schooling When children go to school, they go

to an alien place, they leave their parents, they leave their gardens, they leave their homes; they leave everything that is their way of life. They sit in a classroom and they learn things that have nothing to do with their own place. Later, because they have only learned other things, they reject their own. They don’t want to dig kau kau [sweet potatoes], they say it’s dirty; they don’t want to help their mothers fetch water. They look down on these things. There are big changes in children now. They don’t obey their parents, they become rascals [juvenile delinquents]. And this is because they have gone to school and left the things that are ours.• As described by a parent in Papua New Guinea

Cultural Relativism• The same parent’s view once her child was placed into a

school that used culturally relevant teaching methods.– Now my child, he is in tok ples school. He is not leaving his

place. He is learning in school about his customs, about his way of life. Now, he can write anything he wants to in tok ples. Not just things he can see, but things he thinks about, too. And he writes about his place. He writes about helping his mother carry water, about digging kau kau, about going to the garden. When he writes these things they become important to him. He is not only reading and writing about things outside, but learning through reading and writing to be proud of our way of life. When he is big, he will not reject us. It is important to teach our children to read and write, but it is more important to teach them to be proud of themselves, and of us.


Cultural Relativism

• In Native Alaskan communities, they value the children differently than we do. They have a kind of respect for the child from birth. They are taught to trust/make their own decisions from early on. Instead, we tend to think of children as unformed. So if the student doesn’t want to go to school, the parent won’t force them the assumption being that the school is not a welcoming place for them. They see the schools as being very controlling over the students telling them when to do what.

• Many of the parents even complained that “They’re making our children into robots.”


to the

ing

Hear, Don’t Just Listen!

Relating to Students Lives

• “All we can do is provide students with the exposure to an alternate form, and allow them the opportunity to practice that form in contexts that are nonthreatening, have a real purpose, and are intrinsically enjoyable.”

Relating to Students Lives

• An example of linguistic pluralism – Students in one class in NY were able to create

newscasts to encourage the use of standard English. The teacher distinguished between the two dialects allowing the students to adhere to their own language while also learning a more formal English and put it into practice weekly.• “Would Walter Kronkite say it like that?”

Transforming Teacher Education

• Delpit calls attention to the problem that many minority university education students are feeling isolated and dropping out before completing their degrees. Others do not go on to teach or leave teaching after a short time even after receiving their diplomas due to experiencing so much racial bias in schooling and in their career.

• Delpit’s solution for this involves diversifying the faculty, assigning professors to minority students as mentors, and/or making support groups with all the students so the student is not given the “role” of being the stereotype for the minority.

Dear Teacher: I am the survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness:

Gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot and burned by high school

and college graduates. So I am suspicious of education. My request is: Help your students become human. Your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, educated Eichmanns. Reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they were to make our children more humane.

Delpit, Lisa (2006-08-01). Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom . Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition.

Documents

It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at “other people’s children” and see damaged