Lisa+Delpit

Lisa Delpit grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the wrong side of Dalrymple Boulevard, which once separated the white communitee from the black community. She graduated from Antioch College with a bachlors degree in education and taught at a open classroom school in South Philadelphia. After 6 years of teaching she decided to stop and persued her masters and doctoral degree from Harvard in curriculum, instruction, and research. She developed a new technique in teaching literacy. The idea was to focus on fluency rather than correctness and not give to much attention to skills. Delpit came up with the idea that children do not prosper with the same teaching techniques. With this idea she wrote the controversal article "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." "She holds that most of the problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as schools and "other people's children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics of inequality plaguing the American school system" (Ambe). From this evidence of a communication breakdown, Delpit concluded that differing world views animated her respondents. She argued that issues of power, not pedagogy, are central to the belief among teachers of color that skills and skill-related content need to be highlighted for many non-white and non-middle-class children. Children who already are part of the cultural mainstream arrive at school with -- or learn from their families -- what Delpit calls a "culture of power." This culture involves particular codes, for example, accepted linguistic forms, communication strategies, ways to present the self. Success in school or in other societal institutions is predicated "upon acquisition of the culture of those who are in power." Children from middle-class homes tend to outperform those from non-middle-class homes because "the culture of the school is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes -- of those in power" Delpit claims that skills are useful and usable knowledge which contributes to a student's ability to communicate effectively in standard, generally acceptable literary forms. Skills are best taught through meaningful communication. Delpit describes her ideal teacher as someone who must believe that all children are capable of success in the classroom.Delpit believes that being either "good" or "smart" will not be an adequate guide for the teacher who wants to succeed at teaching all children. Both the moral and the academic are joined in an understanding of power and its dynamics in social and economic interaction. Stengel, Barbara. "Integrated." __Millersville University.__ 20 October 2009 .
 * __​Lisa Delpit Information__**

Ambe, Elizabeth Bi "[|Understanding Cultural Conflict]". Multicultural Education. FindArticles.com. 20 Oct, 2009. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3935/is_200410/ai_n9464742/

Activities and Honors: Dr. Lisa Delpit received the award for Outstanding Contribution to Education in 1993 from Harvard Graduate School of Education, which hailed her as a “visionary scholar and woman of courage.” Her work on school-community relations and cross-cultural communication was cited when she received her MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. Delpit has also been selected as the Antioch College Horace Mann Humanity Award recipient for 2003, which recognizes a contribution by alumni of Antioch College who have "won some victory for humanity." Perry, Theresa. __Race, Culture, Identity and Achievement.__ 2006. 21 October 2009 .

Ebonics and Culturally Responsible Education: Dr. Lisa Delpit frankly and forthrightly addresses the realities of linguistic discrimination in academic contexts and provides practical examples of steps that teachers can take, in order to acknowledge and celebrate learners’ maternal dialects, while providing instruction in the grammar and usage of standard English and ensuring that learners have access to the language of political, economic and social power. She insists that until non-standard dialects of English are recognized, employed and appreciated in academic contexts and across social strata, learners must be taught to use the standard dialect as a tool, amongst many, in the promotion of scholastic, social and economic success. She suggests that children be taught to express themselves with the beauty and depth of their home dialects, learn content in their home dialects and be permitted to express their knowledge in their own voices, while acquiring competence in the standard through deliberate instruction, as with a foreign language. Instruction in the standard dialect must be approached carefully and deliberatly. When teachers undermine children's home dialects, they are attacking not only the linguistic features, but their families and the children themselves. __ The Linguistically Diverse Classroom: Creating Inclusive Learning Communities. __ 21 October 2009 .

=Lisa D. Delpit= 1999 Fall Forum //Remarks are forthcoming. The following was handed out by Lisa Delpit during her talk.//

Ten Factors Essential to Success in Urban Classrooms
[]
 * 1) Do not teach less content to poor, urban children, but understand their brilliance and teach more.
 * 2) Whatever methodology or instructional program is used, demand critical thinking.
 * 3) Assure that all children gain access to "basic skills," the conventions and strategies that are essential to success in American education.
 * 4) Challenge racist societal views of the competence and worthiness of the children and their families, and help them to do the same.
 * 5) Recognize and build on strenghs.
 * 6) Use familiar metaphors and experiences from the children's world to connect what they already know to school knowledge.
 * 7) Create a sense of family and caring in the service of academic achievement.
 * 8) Monitor and assess needs and then address them with a wealth of diverse strategies.
 * 9) Honor and respect the childresn's home and ancestral culture(s).
 * 10) Foster a sense of children's connection to community - to something greater than themselves.

Other People's Children Summary

Of all human possessions, an individual’s world view is one of the most portable. It is also the most insidious in that it serves as a matrix wherein the information a person acquires intersects with that which he or she disseminates. Humans filter all external stimuli through successive layers of assumptions and presuppositions. Layers which have the capacity to alter objective reality to such a degree that one person’s “truth” is another’s egregious lie. Although a frequent and persisting occurrence, this phenomenon possesses the greatest potential for disaster in the course of the interaction between student and teacher in the classroom situation. This is particularly the case when the world view of the majority are perceived as the only reality while those of the minority summarily dismissed as inconsequential. Delpit’s work appears in three parts. The first three essays approach the problem of why children of color seem unable to read or write with the same facility of their colorless classmates. The second part affords Delpit the opportunity to link her experiences in Alaska and New Guinea to her assertion that what individuals know is a product of their specific world view and not an unbiased appraisal. Part three, on the other hand, offers suggestions for solutions and the direction of future education reform. Delpit is concise, and her work is largely free of the jargon and graphs which all too often occur in this area. Moreover, she reaffirms the essential truth that in education, as in almost everything else, one size does not fit all. Still, she might consider that the tyranny of the minority is no less offensive than the despotism of the majority. []

[]