Language and Diversity

This week my grammar class will be considering issues of language and diversity. The Faculty Senate of this university has asked faculty to recognize the work of Dr. Martin Luther King by somehow bringing the issues he cared about into the classroom. The WR 330 assignment this week is to read Lisa Delpit's article, "The Silenced Dialogue:Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children" (Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 58 No. 3, August 1988). As soon as we get the team blogs going, students will be discussing this article and related issues in small groups on Writing Commons.

Some students have noted that the Delpit article is sixteen years old and wondered what Lisa Delpit has been doing since. Delpit is the Director of the Center for Urban Educational Excellence and the Benjamin E. Mays Professor of Educational Leadership at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Other sources for information about Lisa Delpit are:

Review of The Skin That We Speak, which contains an article by Lisa Delpit, 2003.
http://www.essentialschools.org/cs/resources/view/ces_res/291

An interview with Lisa Delpit on Public Radio entitled "Choosing Excellence." 15 minutes. 2000
http://www.pbs.org/merrow/tmr_radio/pgm6/guests.html#3

Several term-papers-for-sale sites also offer brief book reviews of Delpit's book, Other People's Children, which collects her articles from Harvard Educational Review. They are waiting "24-7" to sell you a book review. I'm sure this is not what Delpit had in mind when she talked about access to the "culture of power" through language.

Another important site with information about language and discrimination is:

http://tolerance.org/
This site, sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center, contains many resources for teaching tolerance and living a tolerant life.

On tolerance.org you will also find a teaching tool called Writing for Change, developed at Oregon State University by the Difference, Power, and Discrimination Program with funding from a Writing Intensive Curriculum grant. Susan Shaw and Janet Lockhart are the authors of Writing for Change.
http://tolerance.org/teach/web/wfc/index.jsp

The history of the Southern Poverty Law Center and their role in the Civil Rights Movement is available at:
http://www.splcenter.org/center/history/history.jsp

Vicki Tolar Burton