"Other People's Children" Part II

In the second part of Lisa Delpit's "Other People's Children, she focuses on "Lessons From Home and Abroad."

The first of these lessons comes from Papua New Guinea, where Delpit did research on academic systems amongst an incredibly diverse population of people. She tracks the success of the Vilis Tokples Schools, in which students are taught primarily in their own village/culture's language at first and THEN (after receiving the critical cultural lessons of their people) learning English, the language of business and government. Delpit quotes Linguist Joshua Fishman: "The quest is for modernity ... AND authenticity, simultaneously, for seeing the world, but 'through our own eyes.'"

In "Hello, Grandfather" Delpit relates similar lessons that she learned from Alaska Natives while teaching at a teacher education college program in Fairbanks. The lessons tend to buck the typical "mainstream" thinking regarding such topics as literacy and pedagogy. In some minority cultures it is crucial to understand that context is more important than in mainstream Western culture, which revolves heavily on the "decontextualized word." Likewise, community and connectedness tend to be of greater importance in minority cultures and should be taken into account in a multi-cultural classroom. Learning styles and basic modes of understanding are shown to be different depending on cultural backgrounds, and Delpit challenges educators to take these differences into account.

The third and final essay in this section focuses on "Rethinking Teacher Education for Diversity" and incorporates the feedback of minority educators as they consider the worth (or lack thereof) of their teacher training. The interviewees express frustration with the lack of openness to ideas of the minority and lack of appreciation for their unique experiences and narratives in comparison to the codified and research-based "white" ways of talking about education.

These essays can sometimes be challenging for me, as an obvious member of the white majority (and a male member at that -- yeah, I said "male member") and as someone who has been explicitly taught to value research-based, quantitative "facts." I find myself imagining myself sitting in a classroom with students who share their personal experiences or connections to a topic and chewing my pen (instead of taking notes on what they're saying) and (hopefully not) subtly rolling my eyes or sighing softly. Reading the responses of interviewees in the last essay and the general themes of these last three, I clearly can work on more actively embracing cultural differences and valuing them and including them in the classroom setting (and elsewhere).