I have to return to my homework and if I don't post this now, then I probably won't post it at all. I hope I will return to pull apart my reaction to this article later.
My point I want to make here is that there are inherent and inaccurate assumption around race and poverty and this article unintentionally highlight them for me. That's what I want to sift through and clarify for myself. And how those faulty perceptions affect our future generations. If we could deconstruct them and build better ways to address inequality in a holistic, inclusive way, that is empowering for all and makes everyone visible and imbues everyone with a voice, validates the 360 degree viewpoint, we would ALL benefit!!!!
It is always interesting to note, Martin Luther King Jr. did not focus on difference but on sameness. Difference exist, inequalities persist on the basis of those differences. Education is only one arena where those inequalities are perpetuated. History continues to either be silenced, shadowed, or disregarded despite the fact that is plays a pivotal role in shaping today. Can we address this from a framework of inclusivity and unity-based thinking, without silencing or disregarding or making anyone invisible? This is my wish. We have never been more global centered in communication and connection can effect each other more dramatically than ever before. Science has proven our family bloodlines are one, all across the planet, with our Adam and Eve coming out of Africa. Race is only a relevant term in relation to history, society, and politics.
As a white person who comes from those communities where the 'Other People's Children' came from, I feel made invisible too. At least race, an artificial construct, made some children visible, if in retrospect alone. The poor white kid is invisible on the basis of social class by the white majority, by the community s/he is based in on the basis of race/ethnicity/culture, and then again by the greater social majority when seeking to validate the unvalidated. The poor white kid somehow is excluded from all discourse. I need to get back to my homework. But I will percolate on this for awhile.
Other than that, this is a great article
An Interview With Lisa Delpit on Educating 'Other People's Children' | The Nation
An Interview With Lisa Delpit on Educating 'Other People's Children'
In her groundbreaking 1988 essay “The Silenced
Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” the
elementary school teacher cum theorist Lisa Delpit dismantled some of
the pieties of progressive education. Deliberately unstructured teaching
strategies like “whole language,” “open classrooms,” and “process, not product”
were putting poor, non-white children at an even greater disadvantage
in school and beyond, Delpit argued. Instead, she suggested teachers
should explicitly “decode” white, middle-class culture for their
low-income students, teaching them Standard English almost as if it were
a foreign language, for example, and introducing math concepts through
problems with cultural resonance for disadvantaged kids, such as
calculating the probability that the police will stop-and-frisk a black
male, as compared to a white male.
In the years since the publication of “Silenced Dialogue” and the 1995 book it inspired, Other People’s Children,
the standards-and-accountability school reform movement rose to
prominence. Its focus on closing the achievement gap through skills
building echoed many of Delpit’s commitments, but she found herself
troubled by the movement’s discontents. Many low-income schools canceled
field trips and classes in the arts, sciences and social studies, for
example, in order to focus on raising math and reading standardized test
scores. Now Delpit is responding in a new book, “Multiplication is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children.
(The title quote comes from an African-American boy who, bored and
discouraged by the difficulty of his math assignment, proclaimed the
subject out-of-reach for kids like himself.) “I am angry that the
conversation about educating our children has become so restricted,”
Delpit writes in the introduction. “What has happened to the societal
desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage
and kindness?”
Here, in an interview with The Nation, Delpit discusses the
intelligence of poor children, how she would reform Teach for America,
and why college professors should be as focused on closing the
achievement gap as K-12 educators are. The interview has been condensed
and edited for clarity.
critical thinking; having kids question what is in newspaper articles,
even question what is in textbooks. One of the things I talk about in Multiplication
is that I once visited with some students who were at an Afrocentric
school. I asked them what the difference was between their school and
regular public schools. These middle-schoolers told me they couldn’t
just accept what was in books, they could argue any point if they gave
sufficient and clear arguments supporting their position. That, I
believe, is what we need to aim for, that children bring their minds to
school and not just their ability to regurgitate facts.
good researcher—who had looked at similar kinds of work and had come to a
similar kind of conclusion. While we were in the meeting, I made a list
of words I knew many 3- and 4-year-old low-income, African-Americans
kids would know—like “po po” [slang for “police”]—but it was unlikely she would know. I gave them to her, and she looked at me like, are these really words?
It dawned on me then that one of the problems is that if you don’t know
the culture, you may not know what words kids do know. Granted, they
may not be words that would be validated in school, but it may be the
case that children’s vocabularies are greater than we anticipate.
It is definitely true that children of non-college-educated parents
are likely to have less school-based vocabulary. The issue is what do we
do about it. Many researchers, in their attempt to get rid of the
achievement gap, have said, Well, what we need to do is to make sure
that the preschool and kindergarten teachers help kids learn a lot more
vocabulary. But what they kept finding was there was a washout later on.
It was hard to find a program you could put in preschool that would
continue to have an effect in fourth or fifth grade. The point is, you
can’t stop in preschool or kindergarten, because it’s not like the
college-educated parents with cultural capital are stopping their
education of their children at home. Schools have to continue intensive
development.
[Some educators believe disadvantaged children] shouldn’t go on field
trips and do music because they have to do basic skills. That is said
without understanding that it is through all those experiences that kids
develop the knowledge and background information kids of
college-educated parents already have. You can’t just sit in the
classroom and teach basic skills and assume kids are going to be
developing the rich knowledge they need in order to read complex texts
later on.
deprivation. It should be looked at as the intelligence of a child
learning from his or her environment in the same way a child from a
college-educated family would.
which is one we need to look at again. They actually had teachers
living with families in a community. We may not be able to do it as
deeply as they did, but we certainly can have new teachers visiting
houses of worship, community organizations, and spending time in
afterschool and daycare programs so people can get a deeper knowledge of
who it is they’re teaching.
professors spend time looking at how to diversify whatever they’re
teaching to include other cultures. One of the activities I sometimes
bring audiences is, I ask them to think about an explorer, a famous
writer and a famous mathematician. Then I go back and ask them to write
down a famous Chinese explorer, a famous African mathematician and down
the line. What you end up with is the first list is usually all white
and male, and the second list has no answers in it.
any system yourself, with your own child. I was blessed with a child who
was not school-sensitive. She was also a kid who would have been
diagnosed with ADHD. Just yesterday I was speaking with a teacher who
said she had three kids who just looked blank all the time when she was
talking with them. I knew that was something my child would do. In the
early grades, every teacher would say to her, “Earth to Maya!”
Some kids are bright kids, but whatever’s going on in their mind is
so interesting compared to what you’re doing, it may appear they have
totally blanked out. That is something I was able to assess more readily
by having understood how Maya’s mind works.
Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” the
elementary school teacher cum theorist Lisa Delpit dismantled some of
the pieties of progressive education. Deliberately unstructured teaching
strategies like “whole language,” “open classrooms,” and “process, not product”
were putting poor, non-white children at an even greater disadvantage
in school and beyond, Delpit argued. Instead, she suggested teachers
should explicitly “decode” white, middle-class culture for their
low-income students, teaching them Standard English almost as if it were
a foreign language, for example, and introducing math concepts through
problems with cultural resonance for disadvantaged kids, such as
calculating the probability that the police will stop-and-frisk a black
male, as compared to a white male.
In the years since the publication of “Silenced Dialogue” and the 1995 book it inspired, Other People’s Children,
the standards-and-accountability school reform movement rose to
prominence. Its focus on closing the achievement gap through skills
building echoed many of Delpit’s commitments, but she found herself
troubled by the movement’s discontents. Many low-income schools canceled
field trips and classes in the arts, sciences and social studies, for
example, in order to focus on raising math and reading standardized test
scores. Now Delpit is responding in a new book, “Multiplication is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children.
(The title quote comes from an African-American boy who, bored and
discouraged by the difficulty of his math assignment, proclaimed the
subject out-of-reach for kids like himself.) “I am angry that the
conversation about educating our children has become so restricted,”
Delpit writes in the introduction. “What has happened to the societal
desire to instill character? To develop creativity? To cultivate courage
and kindness?”
Here, in an interview with The Nation, Delpit discusses the
intelligence of poor children, how she would reform Teach for America,
and why college professors should be as focused on closing the
achievement gap as K-12 educators are. The interview has been condensed
and edited for clarity.
In your new book, you write that since Other People’s Children,
some of your ideas have been misinterpreted and used to argue in
support of a drill-and-kill type pedagogy. But if skills are important,
what’s wrong with a “basic skills” curriculum?
One cannot divorce the teaching of basic skills from the demands of some of your ideas have been misinterpreted and used to argue in
support of a drill-and-kill type pedagogy. But if skills are important,
what’s wrong with a “basic skills” curriculum?
critical thinking; having kids question what is in newspaper articles,
even question what is in textbooks. One of the things I talk about in Multiplication
is that I once visited with some students who were at an Afrocentric
school. I asked them what the difference was between their school and
regular public schools. These middle-schoolers told me they couldn’t
just accept what was in books, they could argue any point if they gave
sufficient and clear arguments supporting their position. That, I
believe, is what we need to aim for, that children bring their minds to
school and not just their ability to regurgitate facts.
You are critical of researchers
who focus on the deficits low-income children bring from home into the
classroom; for example, there is the frequently cited finding
that poor children hear only 3 million words annually at home, compared
to the 11 million words children of white-collar professionals hear.
These findings are considered uncontroversial. Why do you find this
research problematic?
I happened to be in a room a few years ago with a researcher—a very who focus on the deficits low-income children bring from home into the
classroom; for example, there is the frequently cited finding
that poor children hear only 3 million words annually at home, compared
to the 11 million words children of white-collar professionals hear.
These findings are considered uncontroversial. Why do you find this
research problematic?
good researcher—who had looked at similar kinds of work and had come to a
similar kind of conclusion. While we were in the meeting, I made a list
of words I knew many 3- and 4-year-old low-income, African-Americans
kids would know—like “po po” [slang for “police”]—but it was unlikely she would know. I gave them to her, and she looked at me like, are these really words?
It dawned on me then that one of the problems is that if you don’t know
the culture, you may not know what words kids do know. Granted, they
may not be words that would be validated in school, but it may be the
case that children’s vocabularies are greater than we anticipate.
It is definitely true that children of non-college-educated parents
are likely to have less school-based vocabulary. The issue is what do we
do about it. Many researchers, in their attempt to get rid of the
achievement gap, have said, Well, what we need to do is to make sure
that the preschool and kindergarten teachers help kids learn a lot more
vocabulary. But what they kept finding was there was a washout later on.
It was hard to find a program you could put in preschool that would
continue to have an effect in fourth or fifth grade. The point is, you
can’t stop in preschool or kindergarten, because it’s not like the
college-educated parents with cultural capital are stopping their
education of their children at home. Schools have to continue intensive
development.
[Some educators believe disadvantaged children] shouldn’t go on field
trips and do music because they have to do basic skills. That is said
without understanding that it is through all those experiences that kids
develop the knowledge and background information kids of
college-educated parents already have. You can’t just sit in the
classroom and teach basic skills and assume kids are going to be
developing the rich knowledge they need in order to read complex texts
later on.
I love the example you write
about and just mentioned, of the 5-year old girl who, when she sees a
police car drive by her classroom, says she isn’t going to let the “po
po” mess with her.
The problem is that it’s not viewed as intelligent but as evidence ofabout and just mentioned, of the 5-year old girl who, when she sees a
police car drive by her classroom, says she isn’t going to let the “po
po” mess with her.
deprivation. It should be looked at as the intelligence of a child
learning from his or her environment in the same way a child from a
college-educated family would.
You are critical of Teach for
America, writing that too many of the program’s recruits are white, that
they don’t stay in the classroom long enough to perfect their teaching
skills, and that they are too often ignorant of the social contexts in
which they teach. How would you reform TFA?
There’s a model from the 1970s called the Teacher Corps,America, writing that too many of the program’s recruits are white, that
they don’t stay in the classroom long enough to perfect their teaching
skills, and that they are too often ignorant of the social contexts in
which they teach. How would you reform TFA?
which is one we need to look at again. They actually had teachers
living with families in a community. We may not be able to do it as
deeply as they did, but we certainly can have new teachers visiting
houses of worship, community organizations, and spending time in
afterschool and daycare programs so people can get a deeper knowledge of
who it is they’re teaching.
In the last part of the book,
you describe why college can be an alienating experience for
disadvantaged kids. What is your advice to colleges that want to
increase the graduation rates of their low-income, non-white students?
I would love to see some professional development in which universityyou describe why college can be an alienating experience for
disadvantaged kids. What is your advice to colleges that want to
increase the graduation rates of their low-income, non-white students?
professors spend time looking at how to diversify whatever they’re
teaching to include other cultures. One of the activities I sometimes
bring audiences is, I ask them to think about an explorer, a famous
writer and a famous mathematician. Then I go back and ask them to write
down a famous Chinese explorer, a famous African mathematician and down
the line. What you end up with is the first list is usually all white
and male, and the second list has no answers in it.
You frequently reference your
daughter’s educational experience. She attended nine schools in ten
years in the search for a good fit. Is there something about education
you learned through motherhood that you didn’t know before?
Everything! There is something very different about trying to move daughter’s educational experience. She attended nine schools in ten
years in the search for a good fit. Is there something about education
you learned through motherhood that you didn’t know before?
any system yourself, with your own child. I was blessed with a child who
was not school-sensitive. She was also a kid who would have been
diagnosed with ADHD. Just yesterday I was speaking with a teacher who
said she had three kids who just looked blank all the time when she was
talking with them. I knew that was something my child would do. In the
early grades, every teacher would say to her, “Earth to Maya!”
Some kids are bright kids, but whatever’s going on in their mind is
so interesting compared to what you’re doing, it may appear they have
totally blanked out. That is something I was able to assess more readily
by having understood how Maya’s mind works.
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