Lisa Delpit: Disrupting Cultures of Power to Foster Transformative Pedagogies

Language and literacy education has long been a site of contestation. Lisa Delpit, an African–American language and literacy educator, shook this contested site in the 1980s and 1990s through her ground-breaking book Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom, by centring the voices, discontentment and hopes of African–American communities that were emerging from their everyday lived experiences in classrooms saturated by cultures of power and norms of the privileged. In this essay, I explore why her arguments hold such deep currencies in the world we inhabit, contextualising it within her work contexts. Further on, I explore their significance and applications within the diverse contexts in which we work in India, to revisit, rethink and reimagine critical, decolonial and transformative pedagogies for India’s fractured, post-colonial, caste-centred, often patriarchal, culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse but often hegemonic landscapes.