Smash borders build culture!

Terry Meier's piece "Why can't she remember that?" The Importance of Storybook Reading in Multilingual, Multicultural Classrooms does the most justice to the subject in the vein of it's insistence that language and culture are inseparable. That's not to say of course that there aren't various wonderfully illustrated points made in the reading. Some of the points of discussion are basic for all social perception but in this reading are well strewn through the focal point of linguistic ability. for example, "children learn to use language in culturally specific ways....The African American children engaged in four times as many interactions that involved extended storytelling and also talked more than the European American children did." I wasn't much of a fan pf the instructions for teaching reading behaviors explicitly, the more contact and information I have in the context of explicit education the less comfortable I am with it. In my mind it always reverts me back to the topic of the "culture of power" and my dilemma with Delpit's piece that to accommodate the culture of power is to perpetuate it. However, in that topic, Meier says something that I find to be vital to any comprehensive education, "Their verbal sophistication provides an important cognitive and linguistic foundation for understanding storybooks and other kinds of written accounts of their own." As someone whose been accused of being overly critical this very concept is so damned important and yet so over looked or purposefully marginalized. If children can't grasp the concepts in a history book for example how can we expect them to think critically about the facts presented. And to add to that if that child can critically consider the topic without the vocabulary to verbalize it there isn't much that can be done with it.