Takeaways: "Other People's Children"

As Professor Patel mentioned in one of our first seminar sessions, Lisa Delpit was one of the first voices in education to "get real" about the realities of urban education. It is incredibly difficult to boil down this book, a compilation of some of Delpit's most famous essays, into "just one thing", but here are a few points that our group found meaningful (feel free to chime in and clarify where necessary, group):

• Instead of the typical "deficit perspective" characterizing how many educators view students in urban schools, it is our critical responsibility as educators to connect to our students' rich tapestry of backgrounds and experiences with language.
• It is additionally our critical responsibility to connect students' background experiences with the "skills" required of the workforce, higher education, etc. We can do this while honoring our students' backgrounds and what they bring to the table by consciously making connections by aligning our praxis in a "real world" context.  We cannot pretend that gatekeeping points don't exist, but preparing our students for those gatekeeping points doesn't mean prioritizing "the standard" as "better".
• Educators of color, in the broader world of education theory and in school settings, are often silenced, ignored, and dismissed in lieu of the arguments of (mostly white) "authorities". Just as "nothing about us not by us is not for us", educators of color need to be heard - and lead the conversations. There should NOT be just one "default worldview" when discussing issues of urban education. Alternative perspectives are just as - and sometimes more - valid than the "standard".