Prompt 4, Delpit

The culturally competent teacher is aware of the diverse cultural groups represented in his/her classroom, investigates the sociocultural factors that influence student learning, and is able to integrate this knowledge into his/her teaching.

Working with Aviv one day I realized how different my experiences have been from the students I am tutoring. We were doing a set of word problem from their text book. One problem had Brett’s usual walking route unusable because of construction, the students were supposed to find the shortest possible replacement path using the Pythagorean Theorem. Before starting any of the actual work Aviv began to read the problem and said to me, “What kind of a name is Brett?” After recovering from my slight shock that he had never heard the name Brett I told him it was a pretty common name. He responded that he had never heard it before and it seemed strange to him. While he was saying this I was thinking that Aviv was an unusual name that I had never heard before entering the classroom. After some reflection I realized that I was so familiar with the name Brett because it was common in my socioeconomic status and race. For the student his name might be equally as commonplace within his community. This realization made me understand how different the contexts of our experiences were. I think because of this, I would be at a disadvantage in this classroom. The culture these students have outside of school is different from my own, and different from what Lisa Delpit calls the ‘culture of power’. The clash of these two cultures within the classroom has the potential to become a disaster, with both sides fighting to be understood.

The challenge of communicating across these cultural boundaries can be mitigated by explicitly explaining the rules of the culture of power, in the case, the rules of the classroom. It seems like common sense that in order for students to understand what you expect of them you must explain it to them clearly. During my service learning I saw the disconnect between the culture of power and the culture students bring with them into the classroom in action. Previously, I believed that students in urban schools performed poorly because they lacked motivation and ignored school and classroom rules. In the classroom it was obvious that the students occasionally did not know what was expected of them. Previously, I’ve posted about the in class assignment that morphed into a quiz. Ms. H was upset that the students were not doing what she expected of them and responded by making the assignment a quiz. The students didn’t understand what they had done wrong and was upset that it was now a quiz. They thought that working together on the assignment was acceptable (as it usually is) and that a reasonable amount of chatter was allowed. The situation could have been avoided completely had Ms. H explained when assigning the work that it was to be done silently and alone instead of assuming that it would be done that way.