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The Skin That We Speak Analysis

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The Skin That We Speak The way a person speaks is a direct link to a person’s culture and the environment which he or she was raised in. A person’s language, skin color as well as economic status influences the way he or she is perceived by others. Lisa Delpit and eleven other educators provide different viewpoints on how language from students of different cultures, ethnicity, and even economic status can be misinterpreted due to slang and dialect or nonstandard English by the teachers as well as his or her own peers. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy, who collected essays from a diverse group of educators and scholars to reflect on the issue of language …show more content…

Language is used to convey a message as well as connect people to a particular culture or ethnicity he or she identifies with. People who share the same language share a bond and pass their history through language. In chapter one of The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom Joanne Kilgour Dowdy speak about growing up in Trinidad and her mother insisting on her speaking in the colonizer's language rather than her native Trinidadian language. Joanne Kilgour Dowdy felt as if her identity was being pushed to the side when she was forced to speak “Colonized English” when she was at school or around the social elite of her community, and felt ridiculed from her peers for speaking proper as if she was white or of the elite social class. Dowdy major concern was how to have the freedom to go back and forth from home, language to the public language without feeling judged from both sides of her …show more content…

10). In chapter six of The Skin That We Speak, Asa Hilliard explains why it is hard to separate the historically oppressed status of African American children and the educational assessments used to measure their language abilities. Hillard also explains how teaching and learning are a direct link between shared language between teacher and student and the environment they are in. Hilliard also acknowledges that “African American children are not achieving at optimal levels in the schools of the nation” (Delpit, L., & Dowdy, K., 2002, p.91). Hilliard suggests that “African American children need to learn languages and content other than that which they may have learned up until now” (Delpit, L., & Dowdy, K., 2002, p.91). This means that educators need to reevaluate teaching practice and the assessment process to fit the needs and promotes African American children’s culture experiences. Provide learning materials that compare their culture with other ethnicity and cultures. According to Darling (2010) “Both segregation of schools and inequality in funding has increased in many states over the past two decades, leaving a growing share of African-American and Hispanic students in highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers;

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