Blog 2: Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue”

 Larissa Guido Swenson

FNED 546 - Summer 2023

Dr. Lesley Bogad

Blog 2:  Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue” and overview handout

Option: Reflection - Personal connections to this text

Growing up as members of a family and community, children explicitly and implicitly learn the rules

and expectations of their cultures. They can be members from more than one cultural group and can be

fitted into their cultures at different levels. Cultures borrow and share rules and cultures change over

time. 

Following up Johnson’s reading along with Delpit reading, Johnson talked about “the luxury of obliviousness” when he said that white people are rarely aware of the privileges they have.  Delpit says, “Those with power are frequently least aware – or least willing to acknowledge - its existence.  Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.” It means to me that one doesn't even know they "have" a culture until they find other ways of thinking and acting. 

Today we are threatened to think even more about other cultures and species, about the biosphere as a whole, to be fearless when we make a new meaning. Educators bring their past experiences and present values ​​and priorities into schools. Their beliefs and life experiences cannot be separated from what they do in the classroom. Leading educators show interest in and acceptance of differences, cultures and families of many students. 

I found that teachers who support children and their cultural linguistic context at school have some common approaches to pedagogy. One and all display a belief that it is their responsibility to find ways to lock all their students into learning activities and they accept responsibility to make the classroom an interesting and attractive place. They work to give students the opportunity to make connections with many levels.

Through Delpit's reading I came to understand that difficulty interpreting indirect requests set by culture of power is associated with one's class in society to the contrary of a difference in racial culture.  Evidence of an unstated set of verbal directives was cited on page 34, “- "Is this where the scissors belong?" - "You want to do your best work today”.

I couldn’t agree more with “anyone who has had to enter new cultures, especially co

accomplish a specific task, will know what I speak”, page 25. 

From my perspective it is a matter of how you express authority according to the rules set by respective cultures. There is no such thing as one way is more authoritarian than the other, “One way to understand the difference in perspective between black reaches and their progressive colleagues on this issue is to explore culturally influenced oral interactions”, page 34.

Reflecting on the meaning of  “My kid knows how to be black…  you teach him how to survive in a white man’s world.”, on page 30 there is a realistic example that explains what is meant when affirmations of this sort are processed, “But that's the school's job." and it continues with,  “What the school personnel fail to understand is that if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by rules and codes, then they would transmit those codes to their children. In fact, they transmit another culture that children must learn at home in order to survive in their communities”.

When I look back to Delpit’s intentions, we have to teach the rules and codes of power and help students value and preserve their home culture at the same time, coming from a working class family and from a different culture other than the dominant culture, I can speak from my own experience that I do find it easier to navigate through the culture of power when set of rules are explicit.