Hollinger in the Trump Era

David Hollinger's Post Ethnic America, a decidely idealist treatment of an enlightened America, one where ethno-racial categories that define our understanding and acceptance (or lack thereof) of the other, is taking a beating in the current socio-political world within which we live.

Understanding Delpit

Delpit, L. (2006).  Other people’s children:  Cultural conflict in the classroom.  New York:  The New Press.

Education reflects the diversity of values and beliefs found in American society and it is the behavior that results when ideas produce social action that is of utmost importance when attempting to assess the complexity of reform recommendations.  Recognizing the complex origins and manifestations of knowledge and behavior, Lisa Delpit’s work, Other People’s Children, is part of the Sociology of Knowledge theoretical approach that focuses on the role language plays in constructing social meaning and determining educational behavior.  Delpit believes that the “most difficult tasks we face as human beings is communicating meaning across our individual differences, a task confounded immeasurable when we attempt to communicate across social, racial, cultural lines or lines of unequal power.  We all carry worlds in our heads, and those worlds are decidedly different.” (Pg. 66)

Delpit’s work focuses on the primary role of educators, especially teachers, in understanding and respecting the multiple cultural lenses that are part of a diverse school.  The current system is dominated by narrow set of values and beliefs that are not shared or understood by those currently outside this culture.  Students of color and poor students are largely alienated from the system because their values and beliefs are not respected or valued by teachers whose own classroom behavior and pedagogy are narrow reflections of the values and beliefs of their own world.  These teacher patterns of behavior are part of a deeply embedded set of values and beliefs that have not been critically interrogated for their cross-cultural appropriateness.  She writes that “we all interpret behaviors, information, and situations through our own cultural lenses.  These lenses operate involuntarily, below the level of conscious awareness, making it seem that our own view is simply the way it is.  Learning to interpret across cultures demands reflecting on our own experiences, analyzing our own cultures, examine and comparing perspectives.  We must consciously and voluntarily make our culture lenses apparent.  Engaging in the hard work of seeing the world as other see it must be a fundamental goal for any move to reform the education of teachers and their assessment.” (Pg. 15)  In order to support the kind of education Delpit beliefs is needed to support the development of communicative competence in students, teacher training program must prepare teachers to understand the power of meaning that is part of one’s language and to teach students to work in a world where different languages are understood, celebrated, and respected. Teachers must be willing and committed to “teaching all students and when they understand that through their teaching change can occur, then the chance for transformation is great.” (Pg. 166) Once teachers are capable of delivering this kind of classroom pedagogy, they can help construct an educational system that offers all students an education that values human dignity and also creates the opportunity for all students to succeed.  Other People’s Children challenges teachers to play the primary role in created this kind of educational experience.

Methodology and Conceptual Framework

Drawing on her personal life experiences and upbringing, case studies from four years spent in an Alaskan Eskimo village and a year at the Vilis Tokple Schools in Papa New Guinea, and her professional teaching role, Delpit’s ethnography focuses on the complex existence of cultural consciousness and the power one’s consciousness has over one’s behavior. Eloquently written, passionate and persuasive, the ethnographic study is largely dominated by Delpit’s voice.  Delpit’s four years in Papa New Guinea, for instance, gave her the opportunity to do in-depth field work and the data generated a series of personal reflection about life in a different cultural milieu.  Delpit’s ethnography is primarily a constructivist approach in the spirit of the Sociology of Knowledge tradition.  She focuses on language as the chief source of meaning making and her field work experience provided her with a rich amount of cross-cultural data that she uses to more fully develop the relationship between language and meaning.  

While Delpit is concerned with the existence of inequality in society and the role schools play in perpetuating this inequality, she does not explain the origins of unequal power relationships as economic in nature.  The origins of class and racial inequality are found in the codes of power that are intimately tied to language meaning and usage.  These codes are similar to the taken-for-granted beliefs or tacit knowledge that Bowers talks about in The Promise of Theory.  Intimately tied to the dominant race and class, these largely unexplored attitudes, values and beliefs are the foundation of a system that has disempowered the voices of minorities and the poor.  Rather than abolish the current educational system, Delpit believes “students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life.” (Pg. 43) It is the human dynamic that changes in the context of the existing educational system.         

Delpit constructs an educational reform approach that will potentially open the educational system to poor students and students of color.  Delpit builds her argument around the concept “culture of power” and develops this concept by analyzing “linguistic forms, communicative strategies, and presentation of self.”  (Pg. 25)  Delpit believes that the culture of power reflect the dominant white language and these codes insulate the existing power structure.  Because the teaching profession is dominated by white professionals and their corresponding monocultural cultural worldview, their inability to understand and appreciate other cultures acts to alienate non-whites to the degree that they (non-whites) are essentially closed out of the existing educational system.  Delpit believes this “sense of being cheated can be so strong that the students may be completely turned off to the educational system.”  (Pg. 32)    

In order to break into this existing structure, students of color must be given equal opportunity to access the language of these codes.  This can happen when white teachers are able to understand that their monocultural world shuts non-whites out of code acquisition. Teachers can be the “source of knowledge necessary for students to learn the forms they need to succeed.”  (Pg. 32)  It requires teachers to move to multiple levels of consciousness or to multiculturalism.  Delpit argues that when cultures move from contending to complimentary cultures all students will benefit from the educational system that is a reflection of the existing culture.  Until then, this powerful monoculturalism has a debilitating effect on not only on students, but professional colleagues of color. 

However, Delpit knows the dominant culture and corresponding codes will not wither away even if there is a complimentary culture.  She believes “each cultural group should have the right to maintain its own language style.”  (Pg. 39)    Thus, while teachers are challenged to rise above their monocultural world, they are also expected to return to this world in order to provide students the kinds of education white students receive.  She states that teachers should “accept students in their own cultural environment but take responsibility to teach them in a different cultural environment.”  (Pg. 38) 

Delpit’s conception of multiculturalism is actually in conflict with many of the practices that have been developed to ostensibly address the needs of minorities and the poor.  Indeed early in her teaching career, Delpit realized that her teacher preparation program did a disservice to precisely those students who were already most disempowered. Delpit contends that popular progressive pedagogies--open classrooms, whole language and process writing--while claiming to represent the best learning styles of children of color, do not in fact match the learning needs of the African-American students and other culturally and linguistically diverse students with whom she did ethnographies.  That kind of classroom creates the “sense of being cheated.”  (Pg. 35)  Referencing child deficit theories, Delpit sees these programs leading to teaching less instead of more and lowering expectations for children of color and the poor, mistaken assumptions and misguided intentions that have an adverse effect on children of color and the poor.  

Delpit believes teachers need to be explicit and clear in providing the kind of instruction that ensures the school provides their children (children of color) with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes that will allow them success in the larger society.  (Pg. 29)  Delpit writes that “explicit works when the teacher has a relationship with the student.” (Pg. 35)  Teachers need to “push students to think” and this can only happen in a classroom where there is mutual respect, authority that is earned through action, and authentic student-teacher relationships.  Indeed, Delpit believes that “black children expect an authority figure to act with authority.”  (Pg. 35) 

Ultimately “teachers can make the difference.”  (Pg. 159)  She believes that teachers must be sensitive to “language and its appropriate use.  Teachers need to support the language that students bring to school, provide them input from an additional code, and give them the opportunity to use the new code in a nonthreatening, real communicative context.”  Delpit does not want teachers to “put their beliefs on hold,” but to approach teaching diverse student populations with “open hearts and open minds.”  (Page 47)  When native Alaskan students were asked about the most important characteristic of good teaching, they judge most positive quality was “being human.”  Delpit’s open classroom concept is one characterized by intellectual rigor, meaningful exploration of the diversity of classroom worlds, and an understanding that “subject matter is important, but insufficient for teaching.  Communication is more than content.”  (Pg. 138) Much like Bowers’ goal of developing communicative competence in students, Delpit sees the classroom as a place where students are socialized to interpret, understand, and appreciate the diversity of voices.  The classroom must be the place where this open, honest, human dialogue is encouraged to exist. 

The potential inherent in all students will remain locked until we “learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our work to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness.”  (Page 47)  Students become active participants only when teachers become authentically multicultural and human. Students have to be allowed to express themselves in their own language style and teachers must come to understand and celebrate this diversity.  Eventually can all be “true ethnographers” of their worlds.  (Pg. 48) Delpit believes it is “not the children who must change, it is the school” and presumably the teachers inside the school. (Pg. 37)  Students should actually be “encouraged to understand the value of the code they already possess as well as to understand the power realities in this country   Teachers, on the other hand, must interpret across cultures, expand one’s own “cultural lens,” and see the world as other see it. (Pg. 151)  The teacher is expected to rise above their monoculturalism, yet understand that this culture serves as the foundation from which students of color can attain the codes to succeed.  As she states, “the language associated with the power structure- Standard English – is the language of economic success, and all students have the right to schooling that gives them access to that language.”  (Pg. 68)  Ultimately, though, Delpit acknowledges that the “most difficult tasks we face as human beings is communicating meaning across our individual differences, a task confounded immeasurable when we attempt to communicate across social, racial, cultural lines or lines of unequal power.”  (Pg. 66)  Overcoming this most difficult task is the challenge facing teachers, especially those from the dominant culture.

Recommendations for Reform

The key to this raised level of consciousness is to “reconceptualize how we structure teacher education.”  (Pg. 125)  Most teacher preparation programs lack authentic learning opportunities essential to greater understanding of other cultures and more appreciation of the dominant culture.  Teacher preparation and practice are intimately linked and Colleges of Education are challenged to reevaluate their role in creating the kind of extraordinary teachers Delpit believes essential to creating a classroom environment that leads to authentic and necessary cross-cultural understanding.   Delpit offers a number of recommendations that she thinks would fundamentally change teacher behavior and practice. 

1.  Allow student teachers to bring in their prior knowledge, stories and experiences to the subject matter.  Do not allow the subject matter to be the most important part of teacher education.  Standardized scores have little to say about one’s actual ability.
2. Empower teachers of color to provide voice to their culture.  This means white teachers have to become better listeners and better humans.   
3. Find real contexts in which teachers can learn and grow.  Teachers must examine their own attitudes and beliefs. 
4. Look critically at the validity of popular teaching strategies.  These strategies may serve the dominant culture, but do not help students of color.
5. Broaden the scope of classroom observation or meet with parents of students. Bring parents and the community into the classroom so they can share their concerns about education.   
6. Send teams of culturally diverse student teachers to observe, collect, and process data.      
7. Transition language from a premise of negativity to one of positivity.  Delpit’s perspective is that teachers focus their efforts on the 25% who did not succeed, rather than analyzing the reasons 75% did succeed.   
8. Attract and retain a more racially diverse teacher population.  Empower teachers of color to be collegial in sharing their culture with white teachers.
9. Critically analyze the appropriateness of a Eurocentric curriculum that is a reflection of the dominate culture and language.   

Common to this reconceptualization are strong beliefs in the value of sharing cultural experiences, finding a greater connection between theory and reality, listening and respecting other voices, and open, honest dialogue about the ways to motivate students alienated from the current educational system. It represents a huge challenge to teachers, especially white teacher who Delpit contends are unaware that their moncultural consciousness has produced such a deep degree of student alienation.  The transition from a monocultural to a multicultural world is a Herculean challenge but until this radical transformation in thought and action happens in university classrooms across America, there will continue to be “misinterpretations about competence, quality, and intent.”  (Pg. 139)

Observations

This is a persuasive, well-researched, and compelling call to action.  In the tradition of the Sociology of Language literature, its sophisticated treatment of language as the primary source of knowledge acquisition and meaning making accurately captures the complexity of the challenge facing educators and the education system.  The intellectual environment that has been constructed, the conditions in which teachers and students learn, and the powerful attitudes, values and beliefs that are the foundation of knowledge and subsequent social behavior are indeed complex parts of an educational system that has not created equal opportunity for all students.  In its state of relative inertia and unquestioned truth, education has been allowed to serve a rather narrow set of interests and students.  Delpit believes that education must rise above this narrowness and address the diversity of values and beliefs that are found within the entire educational system.  Teachers of color combined with more effective teacher preparation programs have the potential to lead the movement to change the way teacher approach their craft. 

It puts most of the onus of leadership on teachers.  Delpit has identified teachers as the one group that has to be extraordinarily wise and aware of not only their own cultural lenses, but the lenses of all students who are in their classroom.  She challenges teachers to “remove the blinders built of stereotypes, monocultural instructional methodologies, ignorance, social distance, biased research and racism.” Pg. 180) Teachers can make a difference, but the nature of the commitment is far broader and more sophisticated than what the system currently judges good teaching to be.  How we, at least those in the dominant class, judge a good teacher would change in the conception of Delpit’s argument.  The whole assembly line mindset of education would drastically change if we accept Delpit’s construct of good teaching, Bowers refers to it as processing students through the system.  Delpit talks about the “strength to teach our children what they must learn, and the humility and wisdom to learn from them so that we might better teach them.” (Pg. 183)  I suspect many white teachers, and perhaps some of color would argue that this is what they are doing, but if they truly understand what Delpit means by humility and wisdom, they would probably have to reevaluate how they approach and practice their craft.   As stated previously, subject matter is important, but insufficient for teaching.  Communication is more than content.  Teachers must be extraordinary not in meeting state mandates and preparing students for standardized tests, but in creating an environment of human dignity and respect.  Build a community of listeners and work to ensure that voices are heard.  At one point in the book Delpit equates the teacher with the preacher.  The successful preacher demonstrates a depth of understanding that Delpit sees essential to good teaching.  Both must be passionate about their role and both must understand the “cultural style of the constituencies being addressed.  (Pg. 137)

Perhaps recognizing that the system is too powerful to abolish, Delpit has created a realistic theory that actually recognizes that the origins of current power relationships are found in deeply embedded values and beliefs and that given the proper environment, all students can assess these values.  Currently there are a number of subsystems at work in American society, some more powerful than others, and Delpit’s approach to knowledge acquisition goes through a number of stages:  1) begins by creating an intellectual environment where sense is made of these alternative systems, 2) through exposure students develop an appreciation for the uniqueness of these competing systems, 3) students (and teachers) begin to understand the nature of the values and beliefs that created power relationships, and 4) there is either co-existent understanding and respect or gradual melding of values, attitudes and beliefs.  The system does change and more people are given access to it, but the nature of change is first led by intellectual transformation that will generate structural change. 

It is not the kind of economically led overthrow envisioned by Marxist critical theorists and perhaps an area of concern is that Delpit does not explore the pervasive influence the economic system has on the power relationships that effect education.  Delpit might have broadened the nature of her work by looking more closely at class status when discussing the existence of an unequal educational system. Poor children, who could presumably be white, are treated like students of color, even though their values and beliefs could be quite different.  The origins of this inequality may not be race based and thus recommendations for changed that focus on multicultural understanding would not address the origins of the inequality.  (Willis, for instance, in Learning to Labour has shown that class and race generate conflict between blue collar lad (poor) and blacks (race).) Inequality whether race or class-based, is an extremely complex issue and while most of Delpit’s work was subtle and nuanced her approach to race and class needs greater discussion. While there can be little argument that unequal power relationships greatly affect the educational system, the nature of these relationships demanded a more varied analysis. We are left to merely accept that they are not being served by the inadequacies of a flawed educational system.

Delpit’s reconceptualization of teacher training requires a leap of faith in the ability of the education to broaden the nature of their program and training.   It assumes universities will respond to recommendations for a new teacher training approach and that the system will value the greater emphasis on interpersonal learning preparation as opposed to subject knowledge.  This is a system that has not demonstrated responsiveness to calls for reform or change.    

It is in that context, that I am not convinced her approach goes nearly far enough in identifying the fundamental reasons there is inequity in the current system.  The origins of unequal relationships of power might actually be found in an economic system that determines consciousness and until the system is radically altered, nothing will change. Educators who are thinking multiculturally will improve the education students receive, but an approach to radical change that relies predominately on the creation of communicative competence will wither under the weight of an educational system that is the by-product of the economic, political, and social system.  If we accept Tyack’s argument, the educational system owes its structure to the dominant class and an economic and political system that largely served the need of this class.  This domination is perhaps so thoroughly embedded in American society that education is relatively powerless to impact the system.  Indeed, Delpit’s argument about providing access to the codes of power is a realistic response to a leviathan-like system.  The old adage, “If you can’t beat them, join them” seems somewhat applicable.

            It might have been useful to hear more participant voices in this study.  She referred to minorities, but only spoke of black, Alaskan and Native American minorities. What about Hispanics, Asians, Latinos, islanders, Arabs, and the continual list of other minorities?  A study on multiculturalism would have been better served to include these other minority voices.  Additionally, there were no case studies done on the cultural world of poor students.  That would have been useful.

Teachers occupy an essential place in Delpit’s educational reform plan and they are primary socialization agents.  However, teacher identity is also dependent on powerful non-educational factors.  Indeed, one could argue that cultural identity is shaped by and dependent on changes in the economic, political and social structure of American society.  The educational system is a reflection of the larger structure and philosophy of American society and until there are changes to that macro structure, the educational system will continue to be a source of frustration when we look to it for answers to why there continues to be inequality in American society.  Delpit provides a compelling and beautifully articulated response to a broken American educational system whose identity has been influenced, shaped, and dominated by external forces and a language that reflects the attitudes of one group.  However, her reconceptualization of education needs to be combined with structural changes to the economic and political system in order to see substantive transformation in the lives of children of color and the poor.  These factors must be part of the movement for greater equality and social justice for all students.