In chapter 8 of Lisa Delpit’s The Skin That We Speak, Purcell-Gates addresses the issue of language discrimination. She describes the situation, but notes, “this reality continues despite what appears to be clear identification of the problem and billions of dollars spent by national governments and internal agencies.” So if the problem has already been identified then what can we do to fix it?
According to Gates, many children start school with some “literacy knowledge” which is usually acquired at home through interaction with family members who are literate. The experiences children have with language are directly connected to their culture. Gates questions whether teachers can observe these differences without believing these children are unable to learn or are incompetent. She recognizes that, “whether or not we interpret differences among children—or adults—as deficit or difference depends primarily on our preconceptions, attitudes toward, and stereotypes we hold toward the individual children’s communities and cultures.”
Our attitudes are sociopolitically driven towards language, and that is something we must learn to identify and examine in ourselves if we are to change the way we teach. In addition “teachers and schools must accept, believe, and act upon the belief that children of poverty are learners have been learning since birth, are ready to learn at anytime, and will learn.” Gates believes if we accept and promote this idea, we will turn the focus from the child that is not learning to the teacher’s instruction.
Most of us are planning to teach secondary education, which means that by the time our students reach high school they should already know how to read and write. So if for some reason we encounter a student who lacks these abilities, how can we help them without putting the rest of the class behind? How would you handle a situation like this? If a student had made it that far without learning, then what can we do to help them catch up?
With all the questions that we are posing as to what can be done to catch the students up who are behind, it seems that it will be up to us in our individual classrooms. However, I do not wish that we be left alone in trying to achieve this. It would definitely be overwhelming, as it could constitute as a full time job while we have a whole classroom of students on our hands. My hope is that there should be a program in which the student can be put to aid in these deficiencies. The teacher’s main job would be to recognize and monitor the issue. I believe that once the awareness is made to student and the teacher, they can begin work on helping to get the student where he or she should be academically.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite points that Joan Wynne presents is the involvement of politics in judging and validating a language or someone’s speech. We would truly be holding students back if they were taught that Standard English is “true” English and the only valid language. Allowing the students “familiarity with other dialects would allow them to construe truer version of American history, be fuller human beings for having access to multiple expressions of reality, and be better prepared to deal with the complexities of a shifting… world.” This is true. Why would we, or why should we all speak the same? It would be a boring gray world if this were the case. If we all spoke “correctly” we would in a world of robots. There would be no color or creativity.
The other key point that Wynne points out is that instead of discriminating against each other, we should learn and benefit from our differences. Instead of putting “the other” language down, we should just educate others that Standard English is more useful and beneficial in the world we live in today, not that a person’s language or dialect isn’t useful or beneficial in its own setting. Now, we only have to make a person comfortable in his or her own speech.