The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children

🙋The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children👶

3 Talking Points:

1.  "Most likely, the white educators believe that their colleagues of color did, in the end, agree with their logic. After all, they stopped disagreeing, didn't they?" This idea of "beating someone down" until they "understand" your opinion is prevalent in this text. Just because someone stops disagreeing with you, it does not in fact mean they agree. If anything you, as the other party, should reflect on yourself and wonder why in fact they are giving up on this conversation. DO they need to be somewhere? Is it possible that you offended them? It's your job to find out and truly care for colleagues or whomever you are talking to. After all, "You can only beat your head against a brick wall for so long before you draw blood".
   
2.  The conversation between Joey and his teacher really struck a cord with me. In my classroom, when a child asks me how to spell a word I ask them to try it first, much like any other teacher would do. However, usually after they have tried it, they want to know if they are right or not. My response is usually some sort of praise for their attempts, (with EBD kids the patience runs thinner than most), and then I show them how the words would look "if you read them in a story". The kids tend to respond well to this because in my class we have stories of all children, including ones that look and talk like them. However, if I was Joey's teacher, in a class deep in the South, this might not be the case. I think it is so important, as we have talked about before to have books that do reflect the lives and dialogues of the students in your class. Even though we did not get to hear much about what Joey thought, I'm sure that book really hit home for him, and he probably went back to it again. 



This is an example of a text I have in my classroom that shows all types of kids. It talks about the beautiful hair of little African American girls, the beautiful freckles of little pale-skinned girls, and everyone in between.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29101499-beautiful

3. On page 38, Delpit talks about a students work that she duplicated and sent around to other faculty members to get their comments. This student was Native American, and as a result wrote differently than everyone else in her environment. Some of the faculty went as far to say that she should not be in the teacher preparation program for her writing. I found it very interesting (more like appalling) that people of such power would jump to a conclusion like that from one assignment. Not to mention, this was a written assignment in a way that she is not used to and the errors consisted of spelling mistakes and sentence fragments. What does that say about the power that those individuals feel they have over the students if they are willing to jump to conclusions that quickly, over an essay. No one say her teach, no one evaluated her, just off of one assignment. 

Argument Statement: Lisa Delpit argues that a large problem in teaching children of color is the fact the non-POC do not want to listen to what POC have to say. They might be listening but "They don't really want to hear what you have to say. They wear blindness earplugs." She states that white people use research and facts to support what they say, and argues that being able to research and find those facts is privilege, privilege that some POC might not have to back what they say and feel