|
Where I live in West Africa, education over the past decades
has taken a wallop from war and the worldwide economic downturn. Because
writing is rarely taught now, I train and mentor teachers who are used
to rote instruction to run out-of-school process writing workshops for
at-risk junior secondary school students, all of whom are English
language learners. I am very committed to teaching ESL and writing
through process writing workshops, but I also have been teaching for
many years in West Africa, and Lisa D. Delpit's writing speaks to
me.
Jacqueline Leigh and
students at Kabala Junior Secondary School in the Northern Province,
Sierra Leone
To begin with, I have adapted for my own use her "Ten Factors
Essential for Success in Urban Poor Classrooms" (handed out during her
talk at the Coalition of Essential Schools 1999 Fall Forum in Atlanta).
Here is the version that I work through with my teachers, trying to
elicit from them that socially responsible teachers
- do not teach less content to poor children; they study their brilliance and teach more;
- demand critical thinking in everything they do in the classroom;
- provide all children with “basic skills,” the conventions and
strategies that are essential to success in school;
- challenge prejudicial views of the competence and worthiness
of the children and their families, and support students when they do
the same;
- recognize and build on strengths in every child;
- help students link familiar metaphors and experiences from their own worlds to new school knowledge;
- bring their sense of family and caring into their teaching;
- assess student needs and then address them with diverse strategies;
- show that they honour and respect every child’s home and ancestral culture(s);
- help the children connect to community—to something greater than themselves.
Because schools here are highly Western-biased and many of the
children live away from their parents so they can go to school, students
suffer a cultural disjoint. As we read Delpit’s (1995) Other
People's Children, we realize a very important point regarding
teaching children using modern TESL paradigms in socially responsible
ways. Delpit points out that whole-language strategies work well for the
native-speaking population they were drawn on, but the poor and
culturally disenfranchised need the workshops and something
more. In West Africa I had been adapting our ESL writing
workshops to provide the something more and knew immediately that she
would mean using explicit instruction.
Delpit (1995) encourages using explicit instruction to make
sure the basic skills are taught, but she presents two
caveats:
- Don’t go back to the old belief that when you teach
children, you are writing on an empty slate. The teacher is not the only
expert in the classroom. To deny that students have their own expert
knowledge is to disempower them. Find out what is written on that slate
already.
- “Merely adopting direct instruction is not the answer.
Actual writing for real audiences and real purposes is a vital element
in helping students to understand that they have an important voice in
their own learning processes.” (pp. 32–33)
I wonder if in sharing this “what works” experience in this
newsletter I will raise readers' hackles. I have received hostile
feedback in the past trying to explain this success to U.S. teachers
because, as you can see, it depends on identifying a population you are
teaching, or a segment of the population, as poor and disenfranchised.
All I can say is, if children from my classes pop up as refugees in your
classroom in the United States, I hope you will recognize their need,
see their brilliance, and teach them more.
Reference
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people's children: Cultural
conflict in the classroom. New York, NY: New Press.
Jacqueline Leigh teaches ESL and process writing at all age levels through the public charity Sentinel English Language Institute (http://www.seli.co, http://sentinel-eli.blogspot.com). She has lived in Sierra Leone with her husband, a consulting civil engineer, since the 1970's.
|
