IWA #2

The fact that no one was safe made all of us involved in the course appreciate the importance of what we came to call “safe houses.” We used the term to refer to social and intellectual spaces where groups can constitute themselves as horizontal, homogeneous, sovereign communities with high degrees of trust, shared understandings, temporary protection from legacies of oppression. This is why, as we realized, multicultural curricula should not seek to replace ethnic or women’s studies, for example. Where there are legacies of subordination, groups need places for healing and mutual recognition, safe houses in which to construct shared understandings, knowledges, claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone.

Meanwhile, our job in the Americas course remains to figure out how to make that crossroads the best site for learning that it can be. We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural forms); the redemption of the oral; ways for people to engage with suppressed aspects of history (including their own histories), ways to move into and out of rhetorics of authenticity; ground rules for communication across lines of difference and hierarchy that go beyond politeness but maintain mutual respect; a systematic approach to the all-important concept of cultural mediation. These arts were in play in every room at the extraordinary Pittsburgh conference on literacy. I learned a lot about them there, and I am thankful.

(Claims are underlined)

            Pratt articulates that learning is the best thing to do in the contact zone, and that learning is the ultimate goal in a contact zone. But I believe that in order for learning to happen, the two different groups within this contact zone must first understand each other, and come to appreciate the role that they each have within a society. For example, in a classroom the pupils must first understand the teacher and the role that the teacher plays within that environment. Likewise, the teacher has to understand the pupils and what role they have in relation to both the teacher and the classroom. In addition, understanding could potentially lead a contact zone to become a safe house, because when different groups come to understand each other there will be less need for clashing and the groups start to see each other on the same level as each other, thus eliminating the dominant-subordinate relationship found in each contact zone that we have seen throughout history.

            As a side note, understanding could be incorporated as a way of learning. This meaning that in order to understand a culture or group different from your own you must first learn about that culture.

            The outcomes of the contact zones around the world often create great learning opportunities for those that are uninvolved. Contact zones can teach people how to cooperate with each other and how much it can damage a society when groups clash.