Black Education and Cultural Powers

In the introduction and the first two chapters of the book, Lisa Delpit tells a few different stories about her encounters with cultural differences between blacks or poor people and whites. She is a black woman who tells and refers back to the encounters she has had when trying to define how to best teach writing to black students in a classroom. Blacks, she says, would rather have more emphasis on skills than on fluency, because fluency is already a strength for most black people. Even if white people do not see the fluency, it is present, and can be seen in the students' speaking and musical/rap interests and talents. Throughout her whole life, she has struggled with figuring out whether she believes in emphasis on skills or emphasis on fluency. While no definite conclusions were made about this, she decided that it is important to teach students in the way that they will succeed in the larger world.

Delpit defines the larger world as somewhere in which a "culture of power" is the dominant culture. To her, this "culture of power" defines the way in which the world runs, so students need to learn this way in order to succeed throughout life. When she talked with black parents, she discovered that the parents were begging to have their children learn 'skills' rather than 'fluency', because it will help them succeed in life (and it is also where these students struggle most). Students from white middle-class culture tend to learn 'skills' at home, so they struggle with fluency, but this doesn't matter, because the world does not worry much about this deficit. On the other hand, because black and poor students are not taught as many writing 'skills' at home, they need instruction. The author also went into detail about the reason that teachers and students of a different ethnicity do not understand each other. She offered the idea that those from a black culture are more likely to directly state their opinions, needs, desires, and instructions. Those from a middle-class white culture are more likely to state things indirectly. When a student, who is used to being directly commanded to do something, is given an indirect question-type command from a teacher or authority figure, it is often misunderstood as a suggestion (rather than a command). While these are sometimes untrue in certain cultural situations, they can give a basic way to begin understanding cultural differences.

I witnessed the writing differences argument while at my previous practicum placement. This was at an elementary school in which almost all of the students are black, with a few white and Hispanic students attending as well. In this special education classroom, the students were learning to write a short essay. The teacher (who is white) had tried to get the students to understand, but it wasn't working very well, so I volunteered to help teach it one day. I had observed that the students were having trouble with structure, so I developed an outline for them to follow. The outline detailed the types of sentences that should be within each paragraph. This appeared to help the students, and I believe that it may have been that it was a type of direct instruction. The strategies that the teacher had been using were not extremely clear to the students, because she had tried to deal with each individual issue as it came up. I think that the students responded very positively when given some clear guidelines to follow while writing. I don't think that it was the perfect method for teaching writing, but I do think that I learned something that day about teaching students of a different culture.