Notes on Delpit

Notes on Delpit

  1. Explicit use of power in the classroom: playlists that analyze students’ performance and plan what they will do that day. 
  2. Directly teaching 

What to do with power in the classroom?

Teaching the culture of power vs. Teaching 

Culturally relevant pedagogy Culturally responsive pedagogy Culturally sustaining pedagogy

— Issue of “black people are like…”

Code switching Teach students the codes of power, and how/when to use them

Today: 

  1. The lay of the land: If literacy mens participating in reading and writing texts, what can literacy do?

  2. Give you access to the culture of power.

  3. Engage with Paris as an example of asset pedagogy: 

            A. What are the assets?

                — what texts does he engage with? [Identity texts]

                — What do the texts do? 

                — What happens when people read and write them? 

            B. What is the nature of the scriptural economy: What counts 

In this article, Paris has a few main goals: Recognize the existence of a scriptural economy at school, a system that defines what counts as a text and who can legitimately read and write texts. Recognize that the dominant scriptural economy excludes a lot of students. Support a counterscriptural economy instead, which differently defines what counts as a text and who can legitimately read and write texts. 

First, a question about texts, reading, and writing: What do texts do? Why do people participate in reading and writing them? 

  1. [Initial answer] Some texts have intrinsic beauty, truth, expressiveness. Some ways of making sense of the world are inherently powerful. [Freire, banking concept of education]

  2. Paris spends a lot of time on Ela’s backpack text. What is it doing? 

  3. In your autoethnography, how did a text function as an identity text? What was the source of its legitimacy? (Was it part of the dominant scriptural economy?)

What is the culture of power? [What does it look like in your discipline?]

We should explicitly teach students about the culture of power so that they can use it.  Instead of teaching students how to participate in the culture of power, we should teach students how to dismantle the culture of power. 

Vocabulary:

Third space Index

LESSON PLAN:

SLIDE: Today we will take up Yosso, Delpit, and Paris. 

Delpit: Are we trying to