Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit (Engl

Description: Other People's Children by Lisa Delpit Presenting an analysis of contemporary classrooms, this book develops ideas about the ways teachers can be better cultural transmitters in the classroom. It suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of colour are actually the result of miscommunication. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description An updated edition of the classic revolutionary analysis of the role of race in the classroomWinner of an American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award and Choice Magazines Outstanding Academic Book Award, and voted one of Teacher Magazines "great books," Other Peoples Children has sold over 150,000 copies since its original hardcover publication. This anniversary paperback edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne.In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Awardwinning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better "cultural transmitters" in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and "other peoples children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system.A new classic among educators, Other Peoples Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of Americas education system. Author Biography MacArthur Award winner Lisa Delpit is the Felton G. Clark Professor of Education at Southern University. The author of the bestsellingOther Peoples Childrenand "Multiplication Is for White People," co-editor (with Joanne Kilgour Dowdy) ofThe Skin That We Speak, and editor of Teaching When the World Is on Fire(all published by The New Press), she lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Table of Contents ContentsEditors Note ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction to the 2005 Edition xiiiIntroduction xxi PART 1: CONTROVERSIES REVISITEDSkills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator 11The Silenced Dialogue 21Language Diversity and Learning 48PART 2: LESSONS FROM HOME AND ABROADThe Vilis Tokples Schools of Papua New Guinea 77"Hello, Grandfather" 91Teachers Voices 105PART 3: LOOKING TO THE FUTURECross-cultural Confusions in Teacher Assessment 135The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse 152Education in a Multicultural Society 167Reflections on Other Peoples Children HERBERT KOHL 185Teaching the Hard of Head CHARLES M. PAYNE 188Other Peoples Children: The Lasting Impact PATRICIA LESESNE 193Notes 201Index 215 Review "Phenomenal....Without books like this, those of us struggling to change our schools (as well as our society) would be unable to breathe." - SAN FRANCISCO REVIEW OF BOOKS "A godsend honest and fair, yet visionary and firm - QUARTERLY BOOK REVIEW" Long Description An updated edition of the classic revolutionary analysis of the role of race in the classroom Winner of an American Educational Studies Association Critics Choice Award and Choice Magazines Outstanding Academic Book Award, and voted one of Teacher Magazines "great books," Other Peoples Children has sold over 150,000 copies since its original hardcover publication. This anniversary paperback edition features a new introduction by Delpit as well as new framing essays by Herbert Kohl and Charles Payne. In a radical analysis of contemporary classrooms, MacArthur Award-winning author Lisa Delpit develops ideas about ways teachers can be better "cultural transmitters" in the classroom, where prejudice, stereotypes, and cultural assumptions breed ineffective education. Delpit suggests that many academic problems attributed to children of color are actually the result of miscommunication, as primarily white teachers and "other peoples children" struggle with the imbalance of power and the dynamics plaguing our system. A new classic among educators, Other Peoples Children is a must-read for teachers, administrators, and parents striving to improve the quality of Americas education system. Review Quote "A godsend . . . honest and fair, yet visionary and firm." -- Quarterly Black Review "Phenomonal. . . . [This book] overcomes fear and speaks of truths, truths that otherwise have no voice." -- The San Francisco Review of Books "Here, finally, is multiculturalism with a human face." -- Teacher Magazine "Provides an important, yet typically avoided, discussion of how power imbalances in the larger U.S. society reverberate in classrooms." -- Harvard Educational Review Excerpt from Book Introduction SCENE I Carolyn is a young Irish-American kindergarten teacher who has been teaching for five years. The school at which she has taught has been a predominantly white, middle-class school in a quiet neighborhood in New England. However, because of recent redistricting, the school population now includes children from a housing project not far away. These children are almost exclusively poor and black. Thus, Carolyn and the other teachers in the school are newly faced with a population of children with whom they are completely unfamiliar. I am working on a research project with Carolyn. She has asked me to observe a little boy named Anthony, a five-year-old black child from "the projects," whom she has defined as a child with behavioral, learning, and language problems. She wants to use the results of my observations to "get him help." In my observations of Anthony in the classroom, I have noticed that he gets almost no positive feedback during the course of a day, and instead receives a tremendous number of negative comments. I have taken Anthony out into the hallway several times to talk and play privately so as to get a better assessment of his actual abilities. The following dialogue is taken from a transcript of my conference with Carolyn about my observations. I am attempting to point out some of Anthonys positive points to Carolyn: L: Anthony told me that he liked school and that his favorite thing in his class was group time. C: Thats amazing, since he cant sit still in it. He just says anything sometimes. In the morning hes OK; after nap hes impossible. * * * L: Hes really talking more, it seems! C: Hes probably never allowed to talk at home. He needs communicative experience. I was thinking of referring him to a speech therapist. He probably never even got to use scissors at home. * * * L: He told me about his cousin he plays with after school. It seems he really does have things to talk about. C: Its unfortunate, but I dont think he even knows what family means. Some of these kids dont know who their cousins are and who their brothers and sisters are. SCENE II Charles is a three-year-old African-American boy who likes a little white girl in my daughters nursery school class. Like most three-year-olds, his affection is expressed as much with hugs as with hits. One morning I notice that Charles has been hovering around Kelly, his special friend. He grabs her from behind and tries to give her a bear hug. When she protests, the teacher tells him to stop. A short time later he returns to her table to try to kiss her on the cheek. She protests again and the teacher puts him in "time-out." I comment to the teacher with a smile that Charles certainly seems to have a little crush on Kelly. She frowns and replies that his behavior is "way out of line." She continues with disgust in her voice, "Sometimes what he does just looks like lust." SCENE III One evening I receive a telephone call from Terrences mother, who is near tears. A single parent, she has struggled to put her academically talented fourteen-year-old African-American son in a predominantly white private school. As an involved parent, she has spoken to each of his teachers several times during the first few months of school, all of whom assured her that Terrence was doing "just fine." When the first quarters report cards were issued, she observed with dismay a report filled with Cs and Ds. She immediately went to talk to his teachers. When asked how they could have said he was doing fine when his grades were so low, each of them gave her some version of the same answer: "Why are you so upset? For him, Cs are great. You shouldnt try to push him so much." As I lived through each of these scenarios, a familiar sense of dread closed in around me: my throat constricted, my eyes burned, I found it hard to breathe. I have faced this fog too many times in my career in education. It is a deadly fog formed when the cold mist of bias and ignorance meets the warm vital reality of children of color in many of our schools. It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at "other peoples children" and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them. But we cannot blame the schools alone. We live in a society that nurtures and maintains stereotypes: we are all bombarded daily, for instance, with the portrayal of the young black male as monster. When we see a group of young black men, we lock our car doors, cross to the other side of the street, or clutch our handbags. We are constantly told of the one out of four black men who is involved with the prison system - but what about the three out of four who are not? During a major storm this past winter, a group of young black men in my neighborhood spent the day freeing cars that were stuck in the ice. When do we see their lives portrayed on the six oclock news? So, as a result of living in this society, their teachers make big assumptions about Anthony, Charles, and Terrence. They judge their actions, words, intellects, families, and communities as inadequate at best, as collections of pathologies at worst. These stories can be justifiably interpreted as examples of racism. However valid that interpretation may be, it is insufficient, for it gives us no clue as to how to resolve the problem. Indeed, these views are not limited to white adults. In my experience in predominantly black school districts, the middle-class African-American teachers who do not identify with the poor African-American students they teach may hold similarly damaging stereotypes. These adults probably are not bad people. They do not wish to damage children; indeed, they likely see themselves as wanting to help. Yet they are totally unable to perceive those different from themselves except through their own culturally clouded vision. In my experience, they are not alone. We all carry worlds in our heads, and those worlds are decidedly different. We educators set out to teach, but how can we reach the worlds of others when we dont even know they exist? Indeed, many of us dont even realize that our own worlds exist only in our heads and in the cultural institutions we have built to support them. It is as if we are in the middle of a great computer-generated virtual reality game, but the "realities" displayed in various participants minds are entirely different terrains. When one player moves right and up a hill, the other player perceives him as moving left and into a river. What are we really doing to better educate poor children and children of color? Sporadically we hear of "minorities" scoring higher in basic skills, but on the same newspaper page were informed of their dismal showing in higher-order thinking skills. We hear of the occasional school exemplifying urban excellence, but we are inundated with stories of inner-city mass failure, student violence, and soaring drop-out rates. We are heartened by new attempts at school improvement - better teacher education, higher standards, revised curricula - even while teachers of color are disappearing from the workforce and fiscal cutbacks increase class sizes, decimate critical instruc- tional programs, and make it impossible to repair the buildings that are literally falling down around our childrens heads. What should we be doing? The answers, I believe, lie not in a proliferation of new reform programs but in some basic understandings of who we are and how we are connected to and disconnected from one another. I have come to some of those understandings through my own attempts to understand my place in this country as an African-American woman: I am the offspring of a teacher in a colored high school in pre-integration Louisiana and a man who received his GED diploma in his fortieth year, only to die of kidney failure at the age of forty-seven because the "colored ward" was not permitted to use the dialysis machine. I am the frightened teenager who was part of the first wave of black students to integrate hostile white high schools. I am the college student of the 1970s whose political and ethical perspectives were developed against the backdrop of the struggle for black liberation and the war in Vietnam. I am the panicked mother of a five-year-old soon to enter an urban public school system where I can no longer buffer her from damaging perspectives. I am the teacher of many diverse students - from African-American toddlers to Papua New Guinean preschoolers, and from Hispanic middle-schoolers to European-American college students, to Native Alaskan teachers. The essays included in this book chronicle my journey into understanding other worlds, journeys that involved learning to see, albeit dimly, through the haze of my own cultural lenses. In tha Details ISBN1595580743 Short Title OTHER PEOPLES CHILDREN Language English ISBN-10 1595580743 ISBN-13 9781595580740 Media Book Format Paperback Year 2006 Imprint The New Press Subtitle Cultural Conflict in the Classroom Place of Publication New York Replaces 9781565841802 Edition 1st DOI 10.1604/9781595580740 UK Release Date 2006-08-01 Country of Publication United Kingdom NZ Release Date 2006-08-01 Author Lisa Delpit Pages 256 Publisher The New Press Publication Date 2006-08-01 DEWEY 370.117 Audience Tertiary & Higher Education AU Release Date 2006-07-31 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:11572274;

Price: 32.98 AUD

Location: Melbourne

End Time: 2024-11-19T03:05:59.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 AUD