--- title: 'Lisa Delpit and E. D. Hirsch' url: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/delpit-hirsch' markdown: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/delpit-hirsch.md' date: '2020-09-12' description: "Lisa Delpit and E. D. Hirsch Nelson Flores writes on Twitter: It is interesting to see how comfortable many white liberals have become with Lisa Delpit's work since the 1990s when it caused many white tears. They often cite her in defense of the importance of teaching POC the codes of power. Yet, …" --- # Lisa Delpit and E. D. Hirsch Nelson Flores writes on Twitter: > It is interesting to see how comfortable many white liberals have become with Lisa Delpit's work since the 1990s when it caused many white tears. They often cite her in defense of the importance of teaching POC the codes of power. Yet, this was only one part of her argument. > > ** I was reminded of this when listening to a podcast by E. D. Hirsh interviewed by Greg Ashman. E. D. Hirsh talks about his research at black colleges in the US: > "The students at the black college did not even understand the questions that I had written down for them and that was a big shock...they didn't understand my simple questions. And a few years later there was a good education professor Lisa Delpit who was black herself, had taught in black colleges and she complained about the education establishment arranging things so that her students could not understand the language of the classroom.... **I felt a lot of support from her work**." > > * : 02m45s - 03m33s (emphasis added)* I wondered what kind of questions Hirsch was asking to the students in his study? And had Hirsch failed to consider the import of aspects of Delpit's writing? Lisa Delpit quotes the work of Shirley Brice Heath who found how questions were treated differently between working class black and white children and their teachers: > "Students were not used to answering "known-answer" test questions of the classroom. The classic example of such questions is the contrast between the real-life questioning routine: “What time is it?” “Two o’clock.” “Thanks.” and the school questioning routine: “What time is it?” “Two o’clock.” “Right!” These students would lapse into silence or contribute very little information when teachers asked direct factual questions which called for feedback of what had just been taught. She found that when the types of questions asked of the children were more in line with the kinds of questions posed to them in their home settings – questions probing the students’ own analyses and evaluations – these children responded very differently." > > Delpit, 2006: 56 Another difference between Hirsch and Delpit seems to be in conceptualising print culture. E. D. Hirsch: > "I looked at what was available in the way of English language newspapers in the country of Bangladesh. And there are 24 English national news papers in Bangladesh. And I just wanted to see if I could read them all. And I could. And so you have a kind of print culture that is by now international and it's got a big hunk of Americanisms in it for various historical reasons and it seems to me that nobody can claim that Bangladeshi newspapers are inherently Anglo-White or whatever. Because they're not. It's the print culture. And that is what literacy is. Is to give them knowledge of the print culture." > > * : 40m29s - 41m29s* By contrast Delpit conceptualises print culture as: > "Print may serve different functions in some communities than it does in others, and some children may be unaccustomed to using print or seeing it used in the ways that schools demand." > > *Delpit, 2006: 62* She quotes work by Ron Scollon and Suzane Scollon: > "...in the Athabaskan Indian approach to communicative interaction, each individual is expected to make his or her own sense of a situation and that no one can unilaterally enforce one interpretation. Consequently, they were not surprised when, in a story-retelling exercise intended to test reading comprehension, Athabaskan children tended to modify the text of the story in their retellings. The school, however, would be likely to interpret these individually constructed retellings as evidence that the students had not comprehended the story." > > *Delpit, 2006: 63* An additional divergence between Hirsch and Delpit concerns the issue of "speech communities". Or what Hirsch frequently refers throughout the podcast to as "tribe": > "It \[the neo-cortex\] had to keep all that knowledge in the mind so that language could work, the tribe could be much more effective than other tribes. That is the shared language of the tribe enabled the speech and the communication to occur." > > * : 07m26s-07m46s* Delpit uses a conceptualisation of communites (taken from Joseph Suina) as 3 nested circles - an inner circle of home/local community, a middle circle of national community and an outer circle of global community: > "In today’s world it is vital that we all learn to become active citizens in all three communities, and one requisite skill for doing so is an ability to acquire additional linguistic codes. We can ignore or try to obliterate language diversity in the classroom, or we can encourage in our teachers and students a “mental set for diversity.”' > > *Delpit, 2006: 68* Hirsch claims, while talking about "American ethnicity" and its diversity (quoting Fredrick Douglass's conception of America as a "composite nation"), that ethnicities are artifical : > "But the idea that you have this definite identity. You don't, it's all acquired....To think that it's something intrinsic, inherent, particularly if you label it with Latino or Black is ancestor worship." > > * : 44m50s-45m26s* Delpit highlights the importance of ethnic identities in language performace, she recounts the following amusing anecdote from Gerald Mohatt a reseacher teaching in a Sioux school: > "It was considered axiomatic among the reservation staff that the reason these students failed to become competent readers was that they spoke a nonstandard dialect. One day Mohatt happened to look, unnoticed, into a classroom where a group of boys had congregated. Much to his surprise and amusement, the youngsters were staging a perfect rendition of his own teaching, complete with stance, walk, gestures, *and* Standard English (including Midwestern accent). Clearly, the school’s failure to teach these children to read was based on factors other than their inability to speak and understand Standard English. They could do both; they did not often choose to do so in a classroom setting, however, possibly because they chose to identify with their community rather than with the school." > > *Delpit, 2006: 52* **References:** Delpit, L. (2006). *Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom*. The New Press. --- ## Navigation - Previous: [Stochastic collocational reading of "the truth and reconciliation commission"](https://rethunk.englishup.me/collocational-reading.md) - Next: [Focusing and proto-standards](https://rethunk.englishup.me/focusing.md)