“…and the five years I spent in graduate school. It was easy to forget failure there. My professors told me that everything I had done in Philadelphia was right; that I was right to shun basals; that I was right to think in terms of learner-driven and holistic education; that, indeed, I had been a success in Philadelphia… In graduate school I learned about many more elements of progressive education. It was great. I learned new “holistic” teaching techniques – integrating reading and writing, focusing on meaning rather than form. One of the most popular elements – and one, I should add, which I readily and heartily embraced – was the writing process approach to literacy. I spent a lot of time with writing process people. I learned the lingo. I focused energy on “fluency” and not on “correctness.” I learned that a focus on “skills” would stifle my students’ writing. I learned about “fast-writes” and “golden lines” and group process. I went out into the world as a professor of literacy armed with the very latest, research-based and field-tested teaching methods.
…
But then I returned to Philadelphia for a conference. I looked up one of my old friends, another black woman who was also a teacher. Cathy had been teaching for years in an alternative high school. Most of the students in her school, and by this time in the entire Philadelphia system, were black. Cathy and I had never taught together but had worked together on many political committees and for many radical
causes. We shared a lot of history, and a lot of philosophies. In fact, I thought we were probably in agreement on just about everything, especially everything having to do with education. I was astounded to discover our differences.
Cathy invited me to dinner. I talked about my new home, about my research in the South Pacific, and about being a university professor. She brought me up to date on all the gossip about radicals in Philly and on the new committees working against apartheid. Eventually the conversation turned to teaching, as it often does with teachers.
Cathy began talking about the local writing project based, like those in many other areas, on the process approach to writing made popular by the Bay Area Writing Project. She adamantly insisted that it was doing a monumental disservice to black children. I was stunned. I started to defend the program, but then thought better of it, and asked her why she felt so negative about what she had seen.
She had a lot to say. She was particularly adamant about the notion that black children had to learn to be “fluent” in writing – had to feel comfortable about putting pen to paper – before they could be expected to conform to any conventional standards. “These people keep pushing this fluency thing,” said Cathy. “What do they think? Our children have no fluency? If they think that, they ought to read some of the rap songs my students write all the time. They might not be writing their school assignments but they sure are writing. Our kids are fluent. What they need are the skills that will get them into college. I’ve got a kid right now – brilliant. But he can’t get a score on the SAT that will even get him considered by any halfway decent college. He needs skills, not fluency. This is just another one of those racist ploys to keep our kids out. White kids learn how to write a decent sentence. Even if they don’t teach them in school, their parents make sure they get what they need. But what about our kids? They don’t get it at home and they spend all their time in school learning to be fluent. I’m sick of this liberal nonsense.”
I returned to my temporary abode, but found that I had so much to think about that I could not sleep. Cathy had stirred that part of my past I had long avoided. Could her tirade be related to the reasons for my feelings of past failures? Could I have been a pawn, somehow, in some kind of perverse plot against black success? What did those black nuns from my childhood and those black teachers from the school in which I taught understand that my “education” had hidden from me? Had I abrogated my responsibility to teach all of the “skills” my black students were unlikely to get at home or in a more “unstructured” environment? These were painful thoughts.
The next day at the conference I made it my business to talk to some of the people from around the country who were involved in writing process projects. I asked the awkward question about the extent of minority teacher involvement in these endeavors. The most positive answer I received was that writing process projects initially attracted a few black or minority teachers, but they soon dropped out of the program. None came back a second year. One thoughtful woman told me she had talked to some of the black teachers about their noninvolvement. She was pained about their response and still could not understand it. They said the whole thing was racist, that the meetings were racist, and that the method itself was racist. They were not able to be specific, she added, but just felt they, and their ideas, were excluded.
I have spent the last few months trying to understand all that I learned in Philadelphia. How could people I so deeply respect hold such completely different views? I could not believe that all the people from whom I had learned could possibly have sinister intentions towards black children. On the other hand, all of those black teachers could not be completely wrong. What was going on?”
from Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator by Lisa Delpit
