Rollercoaster Ride with Lisa Delpit

Similar to the Johnson reading, as I read the excerpt from Lisa Delpit’s “The Silenced Dialogue” I could not help but feel I was on a rollercoaster ride of anger, surprise, and finally understanding.  Like Johnson, Delpit does a great job at pushing the reader to the edge of exasperation and then comes in with disclaimers like “nearly adopting direct instruction is not the answer” and “neither of us is speaking of page after page of ‘skill sheets’”.  Throughout the reading, I wrote notes such as “I’m still not getting the conversation here” and “This is b.s.” and “are you kidding me?” as well as “Thank God you said this Lisa” and “Amen”. 

Lisa Delpit explains in her essay that white teachers are missing what black students need in order to be both successful in the classroom and prepared for the real world as functioning members of American society.  I have done lots of research on how to teach the disadvantaged student in a Secondary Language Arts classroom (not just black and poor but black, poor, Asian, Hispanic, etc.) and I was surprised, at first, that Delpit was going against so much of what I believed were the best strategies to connect with this population of students.  When she mentions “process approaches” vs “direct instruction” I strongly disagreed that a process approach to writing did not have a place in the classroom.  I saw the 1995 and decided that her thinking must be behind the times of the 21^st century research I have put my faith in.  However, I was happy that she suggested a blend of process and direct instruction and I’m not sure I know too many people that would disagree, at least at my high school.  I use process and creativity in order to reach my students and to build a sense of trust with them.  While using process tools like writer’s notebooks, carousels, silent discussions and exit slips (to name a very few) I am able to gather an understanding of what type of students I have in front of me.  I do not assume that because a student is white he or she has all the tools necessary to succeed nor do I assume that because a student is black he or she is poor and disadvantaged.  It is through process that students find the connections to text, self and the world.  Then, and only then, am I able to get the student to the point that direct grammar instruction (as an example) can happen without losing the student’s interest in school all together. 

At the high school level, it is very hard to turn around the fact that many poor, disadvantaged kids have been told their whole life they are disadvantaged and will not be successful.  Many students coming to me waiting for their 18th birthday so they can quit school.  They are detached and disinterested in school because they have been singled out as not bright in the tracking system and many of their teachers believe this is their single story.  As Nigerian author, Chimamanda Adichie, said in her Ted Talk presentation, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.  They make one story become the only story … Show a people as one thing—only one thing—over and over again, and that is what they become.” 

http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

So it takes time to breakdown this barrier in order to gain students’ trust so they know I do care about them as human beings and I truly believe they have every ability to succeed as much as, if not more than, the honor and college prep students.  What this population has, in addition to their ability to learn, is their ability to survive in the real world.  Because they were not coddled by their parents and the education system and they were not told everyday how wonderful they are, they have had to figure this out themselves.  They have the ability, so many of them, to survive and make adjustments in order to “fit in” to the culture of power.  However, many of them have not been told this so they do not believe it is possible.

As I said, I have done a lot of research on teaching disadvantaged students and I did not think about the fact that white people performed most of the research I was reading.  This did not occur to me until Delpit pointed it out in her essay that “people of color are, in general, skeptical of research as a determiner of our fates.  Academic research has, after all, found us genetically inferior, culturally deprived, and verbally deficient” (pg 31).  I do not really agree with the latter part of the quote since I did not notice this in any research I was reading.  However, I went back to one of my favorites Linda Christensen, author of the books “Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word” and “Writing the Word and the World”, and I have to think that Delpit would find Christensen to be an exception.  Christensen taught disadvantaged students, mostly African-American, for 30 years in Portland, Oregon.  I would like to assume that Delpit is not saying that no white person can research how to teach black students successfully.  In Christensen’s article (with accompanying lesson plan) “The Danger of a Single Story”, she talks about her students’ reaction to the Trayvon Martin murder and uses this as a teachable moment for the entire class.  Christensen says,

         “Creating assignments that do the double duty of teaching students to read and write while also examining the ways race and class function in our society is absolutely fundamental today.  As I write this article—to discuss an assignment that pushes students to analyze how their lives have been shaped by the “single stories” told about them—I am also writing to talk back to the galloping standardization that expects all students to reach higher standards through uniform readings that either bore them or have little relevance in their lives.  When students are pulled from police cars, followed in stores, suspended for refusing to obey ridiculous orders, our job as teachers must be to produce a curriculum that demonstrates that they are not alone and not crazy.  At the same time, we must give them tools to dismantle those mistaken assumptions.”

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_04/26_04_christensen.shtml

Thankfully, people like Christensen have made connections, researched and published their findings about teaching students that do not look like her.  I think about this often at my urban-ring high school.  I think about the fact that not only am I white, but there is not one black teacher in my entire school (I think school system as well but I am not positive about that).  How can I teach a population of kids who look at me as part of the problem in their oppressed life?  What can I offer them that they will see as genuine and real?  The answer to these questions is always the same:  I can offer my experience of working with students of all races and I can offer the knowledge I have gained by authors like Christensen and Delpit.  Through experience and research, I have tools to gain my students' trust and to help them make sense of the world they currently live in and a world they will enter very soon as an adult.  Delpit tells us how important it is that the black student learn how to navigate in the culture of power by using the right words and presenting themselves in the right way without losing a sense of self in the process.  I hope I have been able to help at least some of my students with this white navigation system by not dismissing their culture but embracing it and finding a place for it in the adult world of work, school and/or the military.