“Other researchers have identified differences in middleclass and working-class speech to children. Snow and others, for example, report that working-class mothers use more directives to their children than do middle- and upper-class parents.8 Middle-class parents are likely to give the directive to a child to take his bath as, “Isn’t it time for your bath?” Even though the utterance is couched as a question, both child and adult understand it as a directive. The child may respond with “Aw, Mom, can’t I wait until…,” but whether or not negotiation is attempted, both conversants understand the intent of the utterance.
By contrast, a black mother, in whose house I was recently a guest, said to her eight-year-old son, “Boy, get your rusty behind in that bathtub.” Now, I happen to know that this woman loves her son as much as any mother, but she would never have posed the directive to her son to take a bath in the form of a question. Were she to ask, “Would you like to take your bath now?” she would not have been issuing a directive but offering a true alternative.
Consequently, as Heath suggests, upon entering school the child from such a family may not understand the indirect statement of the teacher as a direct command. Both white and black working-class children in the communities Heath studied “had difficulty interpreting these indirect requests for adherence to an unstated set of rules.” 9
But those veiled commands are commands nonetheless, representing true power, and with true consequences for disobedience. If veiled commands are ignored, the child will be labeled a behavior problem and possibly officially classified as behavior disordered. In other words, the attempt by the teacher to reduce an exhibition of power by expressing herself in indirect terms may remove the very explicitness that the child needs to understand the rules of the new classroom culture.
A black elementary school principal in Fairbanks, Alaska, reported to me that she has a lot of difficulty with black children who are placed in some white teachers’ classrooms. The teachers often send the children to the office for disobeying teacher directives. Their parents are frequently called in for conferences. The parents’ response to the teacher is usually the same. “They do what I say; if you just tell them what to do, they’ll do it. I tell them at home that they have to listen to what you say.” And so, does not the power still exist? Its veiled nature only makes it more difficult for some children to respond appropriately, but that in no way mitigates its existence.
I don’t mean to imply, however, that the only time the black child disobeys the teacher is when he or she misunderstands the request for certain behavior. There are other factors that may produce such behavior. Black children expect an authority figure to act with authority. When the teacher instead acts as a “chum,” the message sent is that this adult has no authority, and the children react accordingly. One reason that is so, is that black people often view issues of power and authority differently than people from mainstream middle-class backgrounds.10 Many people of color expect authority to be earned by personal efforts and exhibited by personal characteristics. In other words, “the authoritative person gets to be a teacher because she is authoritative.” Some members of middle-class cultures, by contrast, expect one to achieve authority by the acquisition of an authoritative role. That is,“the teacher is the authority because she is the teacher.”
In the first instance, because authority is earned, the teacher must consistently prove the characteristics that give her authority. These characteristics may vary across cultures, but in the black community they tend to cluster around several abilities. The authoritative teacher can control the class through exhibition of personal power; establishes meaningful interpersonal relationships that garner student respect; exhibits a strong belief that all students can learn; establishes a standard of achievement and “pushes” the students to achieve that standard; and holds the attention of the students by incorporating interactional features of black communicative style in his or her teaching.
By contrast, the teacher whose authority is vested in the role has many more options of behavior at her disposal. For instance, she does not need to express any sense of personal power because her authority does not come from anything she herself does or says. Hence, the power she actually holds may be veiled in such questions/commands as “Would you like to sit down now?” If the children in her class understand authority as she does, it is mutually agreed upon that they are to obey her no matter how indirect, soft-spoken, or unassuming she may be. Her indirectness and soft-spokenness may indeed be, as I suggested earlier, an attempt to reduce the implication of overt power in order to establish a more egalitarian and nonauthoritarian classroom atmosphere.
If the children operate under another notion of authority, however, then there is trouble. The black child may perceive the middle-class teacher as weak, ineffectual, and incapable of taking on the role of being the teacher; therefore, there is no need to follow her directives…
But of course the teacher may not view the problem as residing in herself but in the student, and the child may once again become the behavior-disordered black boy in special education.
…Thus, it is impossible to create a model for the good teacher without taking issues of culture and community context into account.”
from The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children by Lisa Delpit
