Prompt #5: Delpit

The culturally competent teacher involves and works with families and community resources, understanding the differences in families, the important influence of family participation in students learning, and the benefit of collaborating with the wider school community.

Dear Bloggers,

Today I am going to discuss the challenge of incorporating parents and the wider school community into the classroom. Mrs. Medos, the teacher whose classroom I am volunteering in, is very involved with her student’s parents. However, in most circumstances it is not a positive conference between the two. Most often she speaks to parents concerning their children not doing their homework, acting out in class, and arriving late to school. This is a challenge that she encounters when trying to collaborate with the parents on a daily basis. The problem, I believe, is one that Lisa Delpit explains quite well in her article “The silenced dialogue”. Delpit says the schools are failing to recognize that “if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by its rules and codes, then they would transmit those codes to their children. In fact, they transmit another culture that children must learn at home in order to survive their communities”. I strongly believe that this is the problem that Mrs. Medos often deals with. The parents of her students have instilled rules and codes into them that may not be appropriate for the classroom, and they themselves live by the rules, which can cause a large gap in communication and collaboration between the parents and their children’s education.

I personally would have a very difficult time trying to bridge the gap between parents and their children’s education. One direct correlation of the difference in culture is that many if not all of the parents only speak Spanish. This alone creates a huge problem in trying to coordinate their involvement with the classroom and school, when the students are there to study and speak English. So I believe the best solution to this problem is to have the parents work with their children outside of school, in Spanish if necessary, and work on teaching them the values and rules they need to practice inside the classroom. This way the parents can be involved, and the students will arrive on time, do their homework, and not act out in class, which will greatly supplement the time they spend learning in school. With more productive students and knowing they have enhanced their ability to learn in school the parents will by much easier to collaborate with, and the teachers will certainly respect them and thank them for their contributions.

The final aspect that is mentioned in the prompt from the Cultural Competence Teaching Areas is that attention needs to be paid to the differences in families. Delpit suggest that the schools must provide the children the content that other families from different cultural orientation provide at home. I think this is a great strategy to not only recognize the differences in families, but to teach the children the differences in culture and allow them to be more culturally aware. Since most of the children in Mrs. Medos class are mainly from the same country and culture, this is not a huge conflict, however, I feel any differences are explained to all the children and accepted by the teacher as something that is okay, or something she needs to teach the children to make exceptions to while they are in the classroom.