Week One

We are starting the semester with E.D. Hirsch, Jr. and Lisa Delpit- two biggies in the discourse on literacy. From Hirsch, I have given you an excerpt from his list of "What literate Americans know," and a chapter from his widely known book, Cultural Literacy. His list is so interesting to me. Take some time to look through the list, and in an act of honesty, mark which items you know well enough to speak on for a few minutes, which items you know you should know but are pretty hazy on, and which items you have never come across before. Really! Take some time to go through a page or two of the list, and note which category the items fall under.

Considering this self assessment, would Hirsch consider you literate? Do you agree with Hirsch that these items constitute literacy?

This course argues that literacy constitutes more than anyone's list could ever capture. In your early readings, you'll see a variety of definitions of what is meant by literacy, and what it means to be literate.

Hirsch wrote his book to quell a growing crisis of "illiteracy." For Hirsch, the growing number of young people who are wholly unfamiliar with items on the list are cause for alarm. For the United States to continue to be a powerful nation, Hirsch argues, all students need access to this particular body of content represented in his list. In Hirsch's view, full knowledge of this content begets power.

This perspective is under fire in Lisa Delpit's seminal book, Other People's Children, from which our reading "The Silenced Dialogue" is taken. Here, Delpit outlines what she and other scholars call the Culture of Power. For Delpit, power is not ascribed through content knowledge as in Hirsch, but through being at the top of social hierarchies, including hierarchies of race, class, gender, religion, location, language, immigrant status, indigenous status, education level, and sexuality. Rather than direct access to a superior body of knowledge, Delpit argues that stu dents of color and poor students need access to explicit instruction on the codes and rules of the culture of power.


Delpit's article is hinged on pointing out a major flaw in what is commonly referred to as progressive education. Progressive education, first theorized in the late 19 th century by John Dewey and Francis Parker, stands in contrast to what is largely considered traditional education.

Progressive education is best known by the following characteristics:
-experiential, students learn by doing
-student-centered rather than teacher-centered; the teachers is positioned as a facilitator of student learning, de-emphasis on direct instruction
-individualized, personalized
-problem based, geared around problem solving
-wholistic, not compartmentalized into academic subjects
All of these qualities sound, and are, great.This is the reason the progressive pedagogies are still so prevalent. However, in the late 1990s, Lisa Delpit helped to bring the attention of educators to a significant flaw of progressive education: that it reflects white middle class parenting.


For example, on a subway train, you might see one parent say to a child, "Do you want to find a seat?" and another parent say, "Sit down there." Or, in a classroom, you might hear a teacher say, "Can everyone please take out their books?" and another teacher say, "Take out your books and turn to page 57."Even though the former are posed as questions, they are actually also directives.

In white middle class families, directives are often delivered as questions.This is not so for other families, in which directives are only delivered as directives. In some families and cultures, it is considered irresponsible or inappropriate to ask questions that are not really questions, especially to children. Schools, however, especially schools with a progressive bent, operate in directives masked as questions, and this is misleading and confusing to youth who come from homes where directives only take the form as directives.

Delpit is careful to remind her readers "students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors that the must be allowed the resource of the teacher's expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own expertness as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and the power relationships they represent."

Bring your attention to this passage on page 45, and to each of the paragraphs that follow to the conclsion. Delpit argues that youth outside of the culture of power need explicity instructions in the rules and codes of the culture of power, not just so that they have a decent shot at success, but also so that they are better equipped to critique the culture of power. For these reasons, Delpit is emphatic that teaching is political work. What does Delpit insist is our work as educators? What can we take from Delpit to incorporate into our teaching lives?

As you'll see, this course will take up Delpit's argument- that there is no superior body of knowledge, that there is no superior language or dialect- but that students need acess to a multiplicity of literacies, ones that give them access to power, but also access to rich and meaningful home lives, cultural liv es, artistic lives, social change lives, and critical thinking lives.

Olsen's Maps of Madison High plays out the dynamics of the culture of power for immigrant students.

Part II

I’ve been chewing on the connections between Hirsch, Delpit, Olsen and Lewis. As you’ll come to know in our work together, my interests are in connections, in relationships of meaning. I am not a linear thinker; the readings I select are not linearly linked, but webbed, a cluster of inter-related, mutually informed and informing ideas.

It is important to think about what the experiences of immigrant students at Madison High (Olsen) reveal about the culture of power. As several of you pointed out on the discussion board, the Vietnamese student who explicitly teaches other immigrant students about appropriate hand gestures offers a glimpse on why students outside the culture of power need explicit instruction in the rules and codes (like hand signals) of the culture of power. This explicit instruction allows students the space to focus on participating in the task or the ideas rather than worry about accurate interpretation. It is a humane act to demystify an otherwise hidden power dynamic, especially in light of how dangerous laughter and humiliation become for newcomer students. It is recognition that to become powerful, as Olsen describes the process of “becoming American,” is a one-way process, though many of us might like it to be different.

The notion of “taking off my turban” is worth some extra attention. Immigrant students at Madison, many who had never worn turbans, used this phrase to describe where they were (and where they were headed) in their process of making a home in the US, and at Madison. The shadowiness of the story of origin of “taking off my turban” is particularly revealing: some say the student went on to be a raging success, others are certain the young man eventually committed suicide. Note that students use this phrase with simultaneous awe and horror. It captures the conflictedness, the hope and the pain, that young people feel when faced with the stakes of schooling in the US.

This is why explicit instruction in the rules and codes of the culture of power is only part of what Delpit argues will change power relations in the US. Take a closer look at her discussion on pages 39-40. She writes, “I do not believe that we should teach students to passively adopt an alternate code. They must be encouraged to understand the code they already possess as well as to understand the power realities in this country. Otherwise they will be unable to work to change these realities,” (Delpit, 40). Delpit’s vision for change involves 1) explicit literacy instruction and explicit instruction in the rules and codes of the culture of power 2) simultaneous encouragement of development of home language and culture 3) development of a critical perspective on the culture of power. We will see this final point extensively taken up and expanded upon on Ernest Morrell’s work on critical literacy.

Readings in week two will extend point two, the simultaneous encouragement of home language and culture, by disarming the illusions of language and culture superiority.

A final (for this week) note on race. Many people across many walks of life are frustrated by what feels like an overemphasis or an under-emphasis on race and skin color in the US. Many would like to say that especially because Barack Obama is in office, we are in a post-racial era, in which race is less significant than class, and gender, and sexuality. I think it is important to remember that our lives are intersectional, that our identities are at the cross-roads of race, skin color, class, gender, sexuality, language, location, religion, immigrant status, indigenous status, educational level, among many other attributes. However, though these aspects of identity are so intertwined, it is at times useful to pull one strand to look at closely, to understand the significance of that one strand.

Lewis’ discussion of wealth (p. 72-73) is a good example of an intersectional phenomenon in which one strand is looked at most carefully for significance. Lewis contrasts measures of income and wealth (that which is accumulated over generations) as indicators of social class. Using measures of income, race as a component of social class is less impactful. Using measures of wealth, race as a component, or influential contributor to social class reveals dramatic disparities and profoundly uneven distributions.

This is because, though our lives are intersectional, the significance of each of those “streets” leading to the intersection has accumulated over time, across generations. This makes race and skin color salient in a way that can’t be overlooked. Class is salient in ways that can’t be overlooked. Gender is salient in ways that can’t be overlooked. So too with sexuality, language, location, religion, immigrant status, indigenous status, and educational level, all of which we will discuss less extensively in our course.

Race is a thing, and it isn’t a thing. Biologists now know that, DNA-wise, there is frequently less in common among members of the same racial categories than across racial categories. The Eugenics science movement that set out to scientifically “prove” the intellectual and physiological superiority of white people has been exposed as the lies of white supremacy, not science (though the legacy of the eugenics movement frighteningly lives on in IQ testing, standardized testing, and the imaginations of millions of people). Many scientists now believe that there is little biological difference to race. (Ecologists, however, using ecological diversity frameworks, insist cultural diversity is imperative to a healthy, balanced humankind, but this is a cultural diversity, not a race-based diversity). Race, as we have understood it, is a fiction; yet it has very real, felt, lived consequences in all of our lives. Following Lewis’ argument, “Asserting that ‘we are all the same’ is not an effective way to avoid racial conflict. We are all different from each other in ways that are consequential and in ways that are useful” (Lewis, 82).