Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. - book reviews

Black Issues in Higher Education, Feb 22, 1996 by Kamili Anderson

Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, By Lisa Delpit, New Press, New York, NY, 1995, 216 pp. $21.00 hardcover

"...what we need to bring to our schools [are] experiences that are so full of the wonder of life, so full of connectedness, so embedded in the context of our communities, so brilliant in the insights that we develop and the analyses that we devise, that all of us, teachers and students alike, can learn to live lives that leave us truly satisfied."

--"Other People's Children"

It was Rudyard Kipling who so adroitly observed that the story of the hunt would differ drastically "when lions learn to write." And so the tables are aptly and brilliantly turned in this collection of eight essays and a speech by an African-American, Harvard-trained, MacArthur Prize-winning educator who is the current Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Urban Educational Leadership at Georgia State University. Not since Sonia Nieto's "Affirming Diversity: The Social Policy Contexts of Multicultural Education" has such an illuminating, instructive probe of the salient issues of diversity and schooling been offered. Not since Shirley Brice Heath's "Ways with Words" has the subject been treated with such candor and cogency.

"Other People's Children" grabs the metaphoric hunter -- in this case, pedagogy that assails and represses the language and learning of students of color -- and refuses to let it go until it hollers "Uncle!" In the process, Lisa Delpit also stalks and subdues the critical factors that too many mainstream educators choose to ignore when the pupils before them differ from them -- namely, when those students are "other people's children," that is, non-white boys and girls.

Delpit's reflections and recommendations are well grounded in both theory and practice. As a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, she brings a keen and often introspective analytical bent to this volume. She also brings the benefit of two decades of experience in classrooms peopled by an incredibly diverse array of teachers and students, in Native Alaskan schools, in culturally responsive preschools in Papua New Guinea, in resegregated schools in Inner-City, U.S.A., and in vastly different education settings.

In section one, "Controversies Revisited," Delpit deftly sets forth and defends her evocative ideas. The book's second essay, "The Silenced Dialogue," first appeared in the Harvard Educational Review in 1988 as a response to critics of the lead essay, "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator." For the "Skills" article, published in "HER" in 1986, Delpit garnered a lion's share of reproach from advocates of whole language and writing process instruction who claimed she was disparaging these avant-garde modes of teaching and condoning oppressive, rote- and- drill-based methods for students of color. Delpit writes in her introduction about the harsh reproof "Skills" drew when it first appeared, recalling a time when analyses and conclusions such as hers would have been maligned as a matter of course -- when educational power-wielders would have dismissed her views as intellectual impudence on the part of an African-American teacher. Apparently unbowed, she forges ahead by including these articles in this book and complementing them with another reprinted piece, "Language Diversity and Learning," which takes a comprehensive look at the operative dissonances in language use and form in multicultural classrooms.

Section two, titled "Lessons from Home and Abroad: Other Cultures and Communities," presents two articles that flesh out the vision of schools Delpit offers in the opening quote. In these, Delpit draws on her international experiences to illustrate two conflicts whose resolutions are critical to efforts aimed at maximizing the educational potential of students and communities of color. These conflicts are (1) the importance of context versus the decontextualizing rituals of mainstream schooling (discussed in "`Hello, Grandfather': Lessons from Alaska"), and (2) the significance of human connectedness versus the dehumanizing, heritage-destroying processes, contexts and content of mainstream education -- particularly literacy instruction (in "The Vilis Tokples Schools of Papua New Guinea").

These articles clearly reveal that Delpit's profound, yet practical, advice is seasoned by, and synthesized from, the viewpoints of educators of color such as those whose perspectives she shares in the third article in this section ("Teachers' Voices: Rethinking Teacher Education for Diversity"). In this last piece, Delpit -- who has earned a reputation for fearlessly conveying the perspectives of teachers of color, even and especially when they dispute the popular wisdom of the mainstream -- confronts the mounting American dilemma of racial/ethnic disparities in the teacher-student population.

While one does not have to be a sharpshooter to understand that power imbalances exist in the American classroom, particularly in the increasingly diverse urban setting of the public schools, one would have to be completely off-target not to realize that Blacks and other people of color often get the short end of the stick when it comes to commanding and exercising power in educational settings. This is where "Other People's Children" stands out as especially valuable and thought-provoking reading.