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New York: New Press, 1995, 206 pp. $21.00.
In Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit, a MacArthur fellow and Benjamin E. Mays Chair of Urban Educational Leadership at Georgia State University, provides an important yet typically avoided discussion of how power imbalances in the larger U.S. society reverberate in classrooms. Through telling excerpts of conversations with teachers, students, and parents from varied cultural backgrounds, Delpit shows how everyday interactions are loaded with assumptions made by educators and mainstream society about the capabilities, motivations, and integrity of low-income children and children of color.
Other People's Children is divided into three parts. The first, "Controversies Revisited," includes Delpit's two Harvard Educational Review articles--"Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator" and "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." In these two essays, along with a third, Delpit explores how teachers, especially those with "progressive" teaching methods, need to examine how they are helping or impeding minority and low-income students' access to the power that mainstream society and institutions have invested in "Standard" English. In Part Two, "Lessons from Home and Abroad: Other Cultures and Communities," Delpit illustrates how her teaching, research, and living experiences in Papua New Guinea and Alaska provided her with the opportunity to "make explicit to myself aspects of my home culture, which previously had been an unexamined backdrop for everyday living" (p. 92) and informed her commitment to working toward an education that promoted liberation for oppressed groups. The last section, "Looking to the Future: Accommodating Diversity," includes essays in which Delpit investigates how classroom practice and teacher assessment and education must accept "that alternative worldviews exist--that there are valid alternative means to any end, as well as valid alternative ends in themselves" (p. 151).
A connecting theme throughout the book is how power imbalances and cultural conflicts within classrooms occur within a larger society that nurtures and maintains stereotypes....[For example], 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?... When do we see their lives portrayed on the six o'clock news? (p. xii)....
Indeed, in the educational institutions of this country, the possibilities...