The Silenced Dialogue

 The Silenced Dialogue a piece by Lisa Delpit in the larger book “Other People’s Children”. In this piece the author goes over the experiences of many educators and students alike when it comes to cultural differences and power/privilege in education. Teachers play a large role in children's lives and due to this they spend a lot of time around these kids. Overseeing a child's education comes with major responsibilities behind it. To best be able to allow the children to learn you must be able to change yourself as an educator. The ability to take feedback is a major part of teaching and can make a major difference in a student's learning experience. On the surface some may think that teachers are just there to teach, but in reality, teachers are always learning themselves too. This ability to be taught themselves and change is what makes a great educator. Throughout this piece the author shows the struggles of some people when it comes to receiving and implanting feedback. Some people may listen but never actually change or even worse may give off the idea that they are listening but won't actually take in the information. The author does a great job of giving an example of one of these times and a cultural example when they talk about the difference in ways that cultures tell children to do something. The inability to change or take feedback as in this example can lead to a negative effect on the learning environment for children.  

Attached here is a reading regarding teacher identity which is a large part of making a good teacher similar to being able to take feedback.

Power and Privilege by Alan Johnson

The reading for this week was power and privilege by Alan Johnson. This piece goes over many factors of privilege like what it is, how it affects people, and other aspects of privilege in today's society. When it came to this piece, one aspect that I found very interesting and thought provoking was the chart the diversity wheel as seen below. This wheel has many different aspects that can affect the privilege of a person placed all around it. The author then goes on to write about their own privileges seen on the wheel and asks the reader to think about their own wheel results and privileges that come along with them. This created a discussion to begin with, but the author takes it further. He then asks the reader to imagine some of the readers original answers changed and what would come along with these changes. This aspect of the reading made me really begin to think about different ways my own life could have been different and how these changes would affect my own life and privileges. Attached HERE, is another great example of a diversity wheel and a similar question could be asked as to how different aspects of your own life changing can affect privilege. Overall, through this work the author does a great job of challenging the readers' preconceived ideas. He refers to the idea of privilege and other similar words and people's ideas that these words are aggressive or inherently bad throughout this text and does a great job of showing that they don't need to be seen this way and instead need to be used to better our society. The author does a great job of talking about the hard conversations people don't want to talk about or feel uncomfortable conversing about and makes the reader really understand the problems of privilege in our society.