Wysocki & Eilola

Wysocki-Eilola

I’ve read Lisa Delpit. I picked up Other People’s Children over Christmas break for a little extracurricular reading, and I don’t think Wysocki and Johnson-Eilola are using her work in a way she would exactly agree with. The crux of Delpit’s thinking is that, while all cultural groups have their own communicative norms, or codes, in the United States a specific dialect of English, as well as various properties of interacting with others, is the only way to obtain economic success. She calls these proprieties “codes of power”, and what makes them dangerous is that they are seen as the natural way of communicating. There are multiple literacies, each responding to the needs of the community that uses it, but in the classroom they aren’t recognized as being literacies at all, just defective language use. Delpit argues that teachers should learn to recognize the worlds contained in the codes of other cultures in order to connect with the vital lives of their students and create classrooms where they can grow. However, she also argues that it is a mistake to stop teaching the codes of power in the form of standard grammar, narrative structure, etc, because those codes are critical to economic success. In summary, “codes of power”, which roughly corresponds to literacy in this article, are not neutral, and taking them as neutral or natural (natural being the term that Wysocki and Eilola don’t quite put their fingers on when they discuss Delpit) negates the codes of other cultures (which is really a way of saying the entire meaning making enterprise of other people). At the same time, learning these codes is absolutely necessary for marginalized students to share in the prosperity of middle-class America. Perhaps, once you’ve recognized the non-neutral nature of standard literacy, its uncomfortable to recognize that being literate in that situated sense is an advantage mostly conferred by being born in a particular social class, and so its easier to say that literacy doesn’t confer a real economic advantage. Where Wysocki and Eilola call literacy a distraction, Delpit recognizes that her own teachers, who drilled her in the norms of Standard American English, were trying to equip her with a skill that would help her make it in a world that didn’t want her to. Further, she states that writers who learned those codes, but approached them with a more critical frame of mind, were able to use them to disrupt them and create space for other voices within mainstream American discourse.