The Silence Dialogue

I found this article very interesting because it gave me a different way to look at the way children of color should be educated. It was surprising to me
in many ways, especially how many educators of color disagreed with many teaching methods advocated by white educators, but do not seem to be heard. The story of a white educator lecturing on how to educate black children and the black doctoral student who attended these lectures was very disconcerting. The black student expressed the view that white educators don’t listen when black individuals try and express different opinions, with the white educators citing research and discounting the life experiences of those that are living in the culture. This black principal felt it was futile to argue, because “ They wear blinders and earplugs. They only want to go on research that other white people have written. The author stated “ that the black and Native Alaskan educators speak of in these statements are seldom aware that the dialogue has been silenced. Most likely the white educators believe that their colleagues of color did, in the end, agree with their logic. After all, they stopped disagreeing, didn’t they?” It was clear the author felt there was a big disconnect between white and non-white educators, where both want to teach in the best possible way .The white educators seemed to lack an understanding of how the voices of educators of color are not heard or taken into account when planning the best way to teach students of color. Ms. Delpit writes about the “ culture of power”, and lists five aspects of the culture of power and their relevance. She goes on to say that the last two aspects of the culture of power are not widely examined. Number four was listed as, “ If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier. If you think about when you start a new job or even begin a new class, clear rules about what is expected from you and how you should proceed to achieve success makes the task at hand so much easier and much less stressful. The last aspect is “ Those with power are frequently least aware of- or willing to acknowledge- its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.” This element of the culture of power is a very important one, because something cannot change if there is no awareness or there is denial that this power exists. The problems with indirectness and lack of explicitness in education and how this impacts the success of students of color is examined in this article and leads me to think about the methods of teaching we use in the school I work in and even the speech and manner we use for behavior management. Are we being too indirect when a more direct manner is something children of color might see at home and be better able to respond to? Is this a way to try and deny the power a white teacher has over her students of color because it may bring up feelings of guilt over this power and cause the teacher to fear restricting the freedom of their students? It is surely something to think about.