Lisa Delpit, a MacArthur fellow who teaches urban educational leadership at Georgia State University in Atlanta, locates the source of some of the academic problems of minority children not in the internal or external deprivations many may experience, but in the miscommunication they encounter in the classroom. In the following passage from Other People’s Children, she writes of the dynamics of a subtle inequality that in her view plagues the education system.
In any discussion of education and culture, it is important to remember that children are individuals and cannot be made to fit into any preconceived mold of how they are “supposed” to act. The question is not necessarily how to create the perfect “culturally matched” learning situation for each ethnic group, but rather how to recognize when there is a problem for a particular child and how to seek its cause in the most broadly conceived fashion. Knowledge about culture is but one tool that educators may make use of when devising solutions for a school’s difficulty in educating diverse children.
The clash between school culture and home culture is actualized in at least two ways. When a significant difference exists between the students’ culture and the school’s culture, teachers can easily misread students’ aptitudes, intent, or abilities as a result of the difference in styles of language use and interactional patterns. Secondly, when such cultural differences exist, teachers may utilize styles of instruction and/or discipline that are at odds with community norms. A few examples: A 12-year-old friend tells me that there are three kinds of teachers in his middle school: the black teachers, none of whom are afraid of black kids; the white teachers, a few of whom are not afraid of black kids; and the largest group of white teachers, who are all afraid of black kids. It is this last group that, according to my young informant, consistently has the most difficulty with teaching and whose students have the most difficulty with learning.
I would like to suggest that some of the problems may certainly be as this young man relates. Yet, from my work with teachers in many settings, I have come to believe that a major portion of the problem may also rest with how these three groups of teachers interact and use language with their students. These differences in discourse styles relate to certain ethnic and class groups. For instance, many African-American teachers are likely to give directives to a group of unruly students in a direct and explicit fashion, for example, “I don’t want to hear it. Sit down, be quiet, and finish your work now!” Not only is this directive explicit, but with it the teacher also displays a high degree of personal power in the classroom. By contrast, many middle-class European-American teachers are likely to say something like, “Would you like to sit down now and finish your paper?,” making use of an indirect command and downplaying the display of power.
Partly because the first instance is likely to be more like the statements many African-American children hear at home, and partly because the second statement sounds to many of these youngsters like the words of someone who is fearful (and thus less deserving of respect), African-American children are more likely to obey the first explicit directive and ignore the second implied directive.
The discussion of this issue is complex, but, in brief, many of the difficulties teachers encounter with children who are different in background from themselves are related to this underlying attitudinal difference in the appropriate display of explicitness and personal power in the classroom.
