"The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse"

In this work done by Lisa Delpit, she argues about how in Gee's article that even though some students aren't giving the discourse necessary to compete in this linguistic society that they can be overtly taught, contradicting Gee who said that it couldn't. She finds two key arguments that are key to her arguments. The first is that individuals who haven't been born into a dominant discourse will find it harder, impossible, to acquire such discourse. The second argument is that the individual born into the one discourse with one set of values may begin to experience a major conflict when attempting to acquire another discourse with a separate set of values.

The one quote in the text that had a profound impact on me was that when empowering children to make a change a message that is influential in shaping them is "the one thing that people can't take away from you is what's between your ears" (page 549, The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourses, By Lisa Delpit). The reason this quote is so powerful to me is because it's true that the one thing in life that nobody can ever take away from you is the discourse, knowledge, and facts one gains throughout a lifetime. In my future teaching career I want my children in my classroom to know that no matter what happens to you in life the education that you will receive will make it so that you have the ability to compete with anyone else in society.

The key term that is critical to the text is acquisition (page, 547 The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse, By Lisa Delpit). The reasons that this term is critical is because it’s the main argument of Delpit that you can learn “overtly” through repetition and practice learn the discourse necessary to become successful in life. This means that through education and learning the proper discourse you are better able to compete in an environment that is dominated by words. The more that you have command of a certain discourse the better suited you are to be able to gain access to better jobs, better pay, and possibly a better way of life. You can acquire these skills not only from family, friends, kins, groups, but also from learning it in the school environment as well.

Overall, the text describes how one can begin to gain access to this discourse through the schooling process. The teachers that are most successful at achieving this task are the ones who can teach students to write and speak eloquently, maintain neatness, think carefully, exude character, and conduct themselves with a sort of decorum. This acquisition of discourse can be attributed to one or more teachers who are committed to this process.

The thing that teachers can do to overcome these barriers to teaching this sort of discourse is by being able to acknowledge and validate student’s home language without using it to limit their students potential. Secondly, teachers must be able to recognize conflict between student’s home discourses and school discourses. Finally, teachers can begin to be aware of the unfair "discourse stacking" that our society chooses to engage in.