Lisa Delpit 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, she was told, with 46¢ in his pocket.
At only the age of seven, when her father died of kidney failure because he had no access to a dialysis machine, Delpit remembers the local hospital having a separate ward for colored patients.
When Delpit attended Harvard Graduate School of Education to pursue master's and doctoral degrees in Curriculum, Instruction and Research,[5] she came to understand the importance of students learning to write in meaningful contexts.
[2] Delpit went on to explore the novel views acquired about culture and learning by way of a fellowship she received which facilitated her work in Papua New Guinea.
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.
She highlights the importance of looking beyond standardized test scores and scripted instructional programs if one is to truly educate all students.
She asserts educators have much to learn from pre-integration African-American institutions in which Black intelligence is affirmed and which provide students with the motivation to achieve.
[14] In "Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom," Delpit discusses how different teaching strategies such as "whole language" and "process not product" are putting non white students at a higher risk for failure.
[16] "If we do not recognize the brilliance before us, we cannot help but carry on the stereotypic societal views that these [African-American] children are somehow damaged goods and that they cannot be expected to succeed.
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