Weblog VII

Delpit, L. (1992) Education in a Multicultural Society: Our Future’s Greatest Challenge. Journal of Negro Education. 61(3). pp. 237-249.

This article by Dr. Lisa Delpit offers depth and summary to our many shared conversations about culturally relevant pedagogy and teaching in our multicultural world. Consider including this article in your annotated bibliography

Select this or another article from your annotated bibliography to prepare to discuss in class. Use your blog space to gather and organize your thoughts.

Overall I thought this article made some excellent points, but also had some shortcomings. I feel one of the author’s main points was the importance of learning about each student’s family life and culture. She gave a few examples of how our instruction as teachers could improve if we understood what our students are used to seeing in their daily lives. For example, she spoke of the boy who could not perform simple math worksheets on money, but managed most oh his family’s money at home. The context for learning was simply not appropriate for him and not what he was used to seeing. I thought her idea of having the parents and community members come into teacher education classrooms was an excellent idea. I feel that this should not only happen in teacher education classes but also once those teachers are actually teaching in a school. I feel that parent input is a strong resource for learning about your students and this activity could also improve relations between parents and schools.
I think the biggest shortcoming of this article was the negative claims she made about teacher education programs. She continually accused programs of giving teaching candidates the impression that students of diverse cultures and lower socioeconomic status can not be expected to achieve as well as white children. In my education as a teacher candidate, I have never felt that this was implied. In fact, the complete opposite was taught; the belief that all students were capable of learning and achieving. This may be a problem in other universities that I am not aware of, but even in conversing with teacher candidates from other universities, I have not received this impression from them either.