Through AJ's Lens

  CHOOSE A TEXT: The reading that stayed with me the most was The Silenced Dialogue by Lisa Delpit. It highlights an important conversation about how power, culture, and expectations shape classroom dynamics between educators and students. Delpit’s discussion about the “codes of power” and the importance of explicitly teaching the rules of academic spaces stood out to me. I am interested in exploring how different lived experiences influence how students understand and navigate those unspoken expectations in school. WHO DO YOU WANT TO SHARE WITH? I would like to share this topic with both youth and adults who work in education. Hearing directly from students about how they experience expectations in school could provide valuable insight into whether these “unwritten rules” are clear to them. I am also interested in hearing from educators about how they approach teaching expectations and whether they believe those expectations should be taught more explicitly. Comparing these pe...

After engaging with both the policies and the reading Queering Our Schools , I found myself thinking about the gap between what schools say they do and what students actually experience. On paper, policies like the Providence Public School Department’s transgender nondiscrimination policy and the Rhode Island Department of Education’s guidance are strong. They outline protections, expectations, and rights for transgender and gender nonconforming students. But the more I reflected, the more I realized that policy alone does not guarantee safety or inclusion. Students don’t experience policy—they experience people. Policies create a necessary foundation, but without intentional implementation, they can easily become performative. A school can have all the right language written down, but if educators are not actively creating affirming spaces, those policies lose their power. This is where fear begins to show up. Fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of backlash from parents, fear of not ...

Chapter Two of Other People’s Children , “The Silenced Dialogue,” covers many ideas, but what continued to stand out to me was the power of expectations and assumptions—especially the assumptions teachers make about what students and families already know. Delpit writes, “What school personnel fail to understand is that if the parents were members of the culture of power and lived by its rules and codes, then they would transmit those codes to their children. In fact, they transmit another culture that children learn at home in order to survive in their communities.” That quote resonated deeply with me. Students—particularly students of color—often grow up learning the rules necessary to survive and thrive in their communities. From an early age, many parents begin instilling the knowledge needed to navigate a world that may not always be designed to work in their favor. While this is not the experience of every family of color, it reflects my own upbringing. As the child of two Black ...