Lisa D. Delpit is an American educator and author. She spent her childhood years on Lettsworth St. in “Old South Baton Rouge,” the first black settlement in the city. The house in which she lived as a child was built next to the “Chicken Shack,” a community restaurant that her father started with 46¢ in his pocket. Much of her young life was spent in the kitchen with her father. Delpit recalls a Baton Rouge where her mother could not try on a hat in the department store and where black children were unable to attend school with white children.
Delpit attended Antioch College in Ohio. After she obtained her Bachelor of Science Degree in Education, she was eager to use progressive teaching strategies in her first teaching position at an inner-city open elementary school in Southern Philadelphia. The students were 60 percent poor black children from South Philadelphia and 40 percent white children from Society Hill. Dissonance arose in Delpit’s teaching when she realized her strategies did not work for all her students; her white students zooming ahead while her black students played games and learned to read, but only much slower than the white kids.
Later on, when Delpit attended Harvard Graduate School of Education to pursue her Master’s and Doctoral degrees in Curriculum, Instruction and Research, she came to understand the importance of students learning to write in meaningful contexts.
Dr. Delpit has won accolades for her work on teaching and learning in urban schools and in diverse cultural settings. She has studied education in both Alaska and New Guinea, published several books, and is a sought-after speaker. Delpit’s placement as one of the foremost educators and writers on the subject of culturally-relevant approaches to educating students of color began with a series of eloquent, plain-spoken essays in the Harvard Educational Review.
These essays questioned the validity of some popular teaching strategies for African-American students and were eventually spun off into a book titled, “Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.” The book, published in 1995 has been cited for the ongoing debate surrounding what she describes as “finding ways and means to best educate urban students, particularly African-American, and other students of color”.
In “Lessons from Teachers,” Delpit emphasizes the importance of teachers altering practices in urban schools. Among the principles identified are the need to teach more and not less content to poor children, ensuring children access to conventions/strategies necessary for succeeding in the context of American society, connecting students’ knowledge and experiences from their social contexts to knowledge acquired in the schools, and acknowledgement and recognition of students’ home cultures. Delpit asserts these principles challenge teachers to revolutionize education by counteracting the negative impact of stereotypical values attached to students of color in the American system.