The Silenced Dialogue

 The Silenced Dialogue: Power & Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children 

Lisa Delpit

I was happy to reencounter Lisa Delpit, and learn more from the work of this living black education researcher born in 1952 who Harvard University states “worked ardently to promote anti-oppressive teaching practices and reforms to language and literary education. Amid the ‘process vs. skills’ teaching debate of the 1980s, Delpit emerged as a groundbreaking advocate for educational access for students of color.”

In the chapter titled, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power & Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” of her 1995 book Other People’s Children, Delpit explains the existence of a “culture of power” and how it permeates classrooms through individuals’ experience with the dominant culture and the power dynamic between teachers and students.

Delpit argues, among her five defining points of the culture of power, that those who are not already participating in the culture of power – whether due to racial, socioeconomic, or other identity – are better off explicitly learning the rules of the culture, like “discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes” (p.29), to make acquiring power easier. Delpit finds that most white educators and school personnel don’t understand that “if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by its rules and codes… they would transmit those codes to their children.” (p. 30) This concept aligns with Jean Anyon’s findings through her 1980 study on the impact of socioeconomic status that students were essentially taught to meet prejudiced expectations of their abilities and the skills they’d need for future employment.

Delpit goes on to suspect that liberal teachers within the culture of power may be uncomfortable exhibiting an authoritative style in the classroom, leading students outside of the culture to feel they are being deprived of the teacher’s expertise. Cultural viewpoints come into play: does a teacher earn the privilege of being an authoritarian because they are a teacher, or does a teacher “achieve authority by acquisition of an authoritative role?” (p.35) 

Through qualitative research, Delpit shares stories of students and educators being denied the success they seek, leading to Delpit’s understanding that “pretending that gatekeeping points don’t exist is to ensure that many students will not pass through them.” (p.39) This “pretending” reminded me of Melody Hobson’s call for “Color Bravery” in order to push through the uncomfortable conversations that can lead to breakthroughs in our thinking about race and inequality. Delpit seems to have approached her entire career through the lens of Color Bravery.

To summarize, Delpit suggests that “students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized, subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher’s expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own ‘expertness’ as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent.” (p. 45)

For me, this really gets at the heart of my early educational experience. My 36-student Kindergarten classroom was taught by two stern, elderly nuns. Through consternation, I strived to precisely learn their rules to avoid punishment. This continued even after transitioning to public school in third grade. I couldn’t understand how some children exhibited behaviors that drew humiliating punishments. Looking back now, it’s easy to see the arbitrariness of these “rules” (aka the culture of power) that Delpit identifies, and how it was especially challenging for some of my classmates to adhere to them. 

Last, I’ll share that in a previous class I summarized a reading of Delpit’s advice to teachers and youth workers preparing to encounter a wide range of cultures, abilities, and talents, as:

1. Humbly recognize you have much to learn from your students and their communities.

2. Approach the work with a sense of inquiry.

3. Be willing to share your story.