Engaging With Others in Conversation
So far, this article has looked at building students’ resources for literal participation in conversation. The focus turns now to the other sense of conversation, that is, to engagement with the ideas and experiences of others (Appiah, 2007).
Engagement cannot be taken for granted. In part, this is because conversation across difference can be face threatening, as evident from the Summer Text data analyzed earlier. Face is a key theme in the accounts of schooling provided by students from Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, and Eritrea who participated in the project that produced that data. Students spoke repeatedly of “understanding.” They praised teachers who were relatively easy to understand (“normal,” as one student put it), and who understood them well. They advised students like themselves to work hard to understand lessons. The students’ parents also reported that they had been encouraged by teachers to talk with their children about the importance of speaking up in class to clarify problems of understanding. Yet, some of the students said that they would neither answer teachers’ questions nor ask questions in class. Rather, they would seek help from friends or from the teacher after class.
Asked to explain their reluctance to speak, students said they feared being made fun of: “The good friends tell you things, how to do it and don’t laugh at you, but the bad friend laugh at you and say ‘you don’t know things.'” In contrast, one student indicated that he often sought clarification: “If I don’t understand something I can ask them [teachers] and they’ll help me. Yeah, they help me to understand.” Asked why he was not afraid, this student noted the risk: “The other students asking like silly questions, the other students laugh sometimes,” but said he still asked for help because, “I want to know what it says.” The point here is that face was a consideration in classrooms where differences of language proficiency were used to discriminate against others. With an apologetic nod to my own whiteness, one student overtly attributed the embarrassment she suffered in these classes to white students’ exercise of racial power, naming the behaviors as racist.
People are likely to apply themselves most to the face-threatening work of negotiating understanding across linguistic and cultural difference when the risk is not too great, “if the learning environment feels safe, if it is a place where the learner feels they still belong even if only as a traveller” (Kalantzis et al., 2005, p. 48). Furthermore, engagement is more likely if all speakers are deeply invested in the success of a given conversation (Goldstein, 2003; Lippi-Green, 1997). In the words of Appiah (2007), the great lesson of anthropology is that when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, sharing a human social life, you may like or dislike him, you may agree or disagree; but, if it is what you both want, you can make sense of each other in the end.
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