Re: What do you think/the silenced dialogue

Judy (diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu)
Thu, 21 Dec 1995 21:09:35 -0500

In my reading of the article Peter referred to, Delpit does not support
authoritarian versus whole language classrooms; she argues for a dialogue
between pedagogical philosophies and attention to the children who are
presumably to benefit from them. It is really about white teachers not
listening to black teachers, not about how black teachers are right and
white teachers wrong. Delpit did not develop her own pedagogy in that
article or in the follow-up article (_Skills and other Dilemmas of a
Progressive Balck Educator_ Harvard Ed. Review V. 56 n. 4), but she did
make explicit that she believed in a mix of strategies (p.384). I take both
articles as the wake-up call they were, charging educators to use
one another's resources to make classrooms better, especially for
kids from non middle class backgrounds.

However, I share Peter's concern about the different orientations
to authority that Delpit's article makes reference to. I do
think it's possible for a teacher to make non-negotiable demands
on students in the "meanest" possible terms while still building
a community of practice around students' contributions, valuing
what they have to say, responding to their initiatives, etc.
Carol Lee's videotape of her own teaching, that I know at least
Peter has seen, shows some of this, embedding a progressive,
critical pedagogy in discourse straight out of what Gwaltney
in _Drylongso_ called "core Black Culture." Here, values are
shared while new values are introduced. Sadly, the disciplinarian
teacher in a class of low SES students is not often someone from
their own community. Discipline fills in for teacher-student
communication, the bottom line for building challenging activities
the students can access.

This is where I wish Jay or someone else with Bernstein & Halliday under
their belt would take up questions of practice. If I understand the
implications(of theories I'm not very familiar with) correctly,
in high SES classrooms, where boundaries are negotiable, the register
of talk is likely to be more like that of formal settings, while in low
SES classrooms, where things are more rigid, the register of talk
is likely to be neither formal nor informal but artificial, a restricted
form of school-based talk. If formal situations are
where the ship gets navigated from, then surely we want students to develop
a "disposition" (Gordon, citing Pierre) for the discourse of such settings -
the discourse of relatively high status social groups. But what features of
that discourse are necessary to make legitimate contributions to the
navigation of the ship? There is probably a better question to ask, but
it's not available to me at the moment. Any help thinking this through
would be appreciated.
Judy Diamondstone
diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University