Black History Month Heroes: Lisa Delpit and Nadia Lopez

Teachers have the challenging task of making complex, alienating, and difficult discourse manageable, applicable, and engaging for their students. Lisa Delpit and Nadia Lopez are two educators whose unique approaches to education consider the important roles that culture and community play in how students learn.

Lisa Delpit

LisaDelpit is currently the Felton G. Clark distinguished professor of education at Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA. She formerly founded and directed the Center for Urban Educational Excellence at Florida International University. She is an educationalist and an education reform leader with numerous accolades for her research about culturally relevant and contextual teaching methodology in urban schools. She is renowned for her article “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children” and the subsequent MacArthur “genius” award she received because of this work, as well as other research endeavors. Major themes of her work include merging disparate teaching methods and promoting student inquiry. “As I have been reminded of by many teachers since the publication of my article, those who are most skillful at educating black and poor children do not allow themselves to be placed in “skills” or “process” boxes. They understand the need for both approaches, the need to help students to establish their own voices, but to coach those voices to produce notes that will be heard clearly in the larger society.” She is also a proponent of social justice teaching, that is, community-based, justice-oriented lessons, where teachers involve themselves in the communities of their students. The foundation of which is to illuminate that “…classroom life is complex, influenced by multiple social practices inside and outside classroom walls, and that educators should make efforts to allow these practices to guide and enrich subject area.”

Nadia Lopez

Brandon: Who’s influenced you the most in your life?

Vidal: My principal, Ms. Lopez.

Brandon: How has she influenced you?

Vidal: When we get in trouble, she doesn’t suspend us. She calls us to her office and explains to us how society was built down around us. And she tells us that each time somebody fails out of school, a new jail cell gets built. And one time she made every student stand up, one at a time, and she told each one of us that we matter.

This brief but illuminating interview between 13-year old Vidal Chastanet, a student at Mott Hall Bridges Academy, and Brandon Stanton, a photographer for the blog Humans of New York gained national attention in the new year. Ms. Lopez, the principal of Mott Hall Bridges Academy, has been able to create a platform illuminating the challenges of closing the achievement gap of her students in a school in the low-income, high-crime rate neighborhood of Brownsville in New York City. “As educators, I think we’ve taken a beating because there’s been so much change in the standards and curriculum, and there was never any time to process and really come together with a cohesive model of what that’s really gonna look like. There’s a lot of time being spent on how do we make kids pass a test, and how validated we are by numbers, but through that process we’re stressing ourselves out, and we’re losing the passion behind education. I think that we need to start becoming a community, so that it’s not always left to just the schools to make a difference. There’s so much that people on the outside can do rather than just either pass judgment or turn a blind eye to it.”

Since then, her school has benefited from a fundraiser that will send the students from the academy on a college visit to Harvard and will also support summer programming. Ms. Lopez and Vidal were also invited to the White House, where President Obama discussed the importance of asking for help and garnering support to get ahead in life

Sources

• Delpit, Lisa. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.” Harvard Educational Review 58.3 (1988): 280-98. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
• Education in a multicultural society: Our future’s greatest challenge. In Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom (pp. 167-183). New York: The New Press.
• Goldstein, Dana. “An Interview With Lisa Delpit on Educating ‘Other People’s Children'” The Nation. The Nation, 19 Mar. 2012. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.
• Segal, Corrine. “How a ‘Humans of New York’ Blog Post Inspired a Principal and a $1.2 Million Fundraiser.” PBS. PBS, 5 Feb. 2015. Web. 20 Feb. 2015.