When I Grow Up, I Want to Be....An Ethnographer?

Reading Two: Lisa Delpit - "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children"

“No, I am certain that if we are truly to effect societal change, we cannot do so from the bottom up, but we must push and agitate from the top down” (40).  Wait a minute – isn’t that exactly what we discussed in class?! Society will truly change if we make the rain stop, rather than simply hand out more umbrellas. We can't wait for society to change itself, we (those in power) have to work on changing it ourselves. Or something along those lines. Yes! Way to go, team! We knew what Delpit was all about before we even read her article (well, read it again…).

I remember reading this article in FNED 346, with Dr. August. My first education class, and I had no idea what to expect.  I remember thinking, wait – when do I learn how to set up my gradebook, and practice writing on the board? It was in this class that I got my very first peek at the real challenges that would await me in the classroom. It was also in this class that I realized teaching was very different in the kind of schools I grew up attending (white, middle-class) and in the schools that I would someday teach in.  One of the issues Delpit addresses is an issue that is still questioned today: can white teachers effectively teach black students?

Delpit concludes in her article that the greatest dilemma we face as teachers is “in communicating across cultures and in addressing the more fundamental issue of power” (46). As teachers we have a certain power and a certain responsibility to not only teach our students about the rules and “codes” of power, but also how these codes of power interact with their own codes, and why it is important for them to learn about both of them, to know the difference, to know why each is important in its own way. She, much like Johnson, insists on a true discussion with all of the issues in the open, both sides listening, “a very special kind of listening, listening that requires not only open eyes and ears, but open hearts and minds” (46).

 It shouldn’t matter if the classroom contains a white teacher and black students, a black teacher and white students, or any combination at all of teacher and students! What should matter is how teachers and students interact with one another, and how teachers (of any color) listen to the voices of their students and what they have to say. We have to be willing to “put our beliefs on hold” in order to learn what it might feel like to be someone else, and teach our students how to do the same. Not only will we then become ethnographers, but our students will have the ability to as well, and that is where the change will come from. That is how we can stop the rain.