Hearing the “Silenced Dialogue” – Lisa Delpit

[Argument Post]

What is the best way to educate students of color? If you had asked me that question last week I would have said, “What do you mean? Teaching students of color vs. white students should be the same, shouldn’t it? Methods of teaching shouldn’t depend on the student’s race, right?”

Lisa Delpit explores this question in her article, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children” (This definitely wasn’t an easy read – it took a lot of thinking and rereading to take all 26 pages of thoughts, examples, and ideas and piece it all together into one clear main idea– but I think I managed to find her central argument  J ).

Delpit argues that students should be educated in a way that allows them to express their own culture through language, but also teaches them how to be successful in today’s American workforce.  As she explains, American society has one major “culture of power,” or one culture that dominates over all others (in this case, a white, middle-class background). Even though the children in the school system come from all different ethnic, racial, social, and religious backgrounds, they are all taught to conform to the culture of power when they are in school; that is, the same way of thinking, behaving, and speaking that is common in the white middle-class culture. However, Delpit argues that the goal of education should not be to erase all other backgrounds, but to allow each child to develop their own culture, while also learning how to function and succeed within the dominant American society as a whole.

An article by Tim Walker, “Closing the Culture Gap” also explains the role of cultural diversity in the school system, and the steps that teachers are taking to realize the impact of this diversity on children’s education. One teacher, Devon Alexander, shares many of the same arguments as Delpit: he says, “First and foremost, let your students know that their lived experiences are valid and valued. They have every right to hold on to who they are, what they know, and what they live, even if sometimes they have to stop and work through differences, but you also have to show them how to navigate our school culture so they can succeed.”

Even though as first, I thought all children should be educated in the same way (after all, we’re eventually striving for equality in society here), I’m realizing that there are reasons that all children actually should be taught differently based on the culture that they come from. The story that Delpit shares about the Native Alaskan class learning two different kinds of English – “Heritage Language” and “Standard English” - really struck me as inspiring. Reading that taught me that it is possible for us to learn how to express ourselves in our own way while also being able to speak and write in a way that everyone can understand.

 As a musician, I think of it like music – everyone learns how to speak their own language, but everyone, regardless of the language you speak, can learn to interpret music, the “international language.” As Delpit puts it, "Children have the right to their own language, their own culture. …It is not they, the children, who must change, but the schools. To push children to do anything else is repressive and reactionary” (37).

Picture sources: http://sonyawoodman.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/classroom-diversity.jpg, http://farm3.staticflickr.com/2544/3809460658_93f977c3f6_o.jpg