2E. POLITICAL TALK ON THE GO: Turning our stories into conversations.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE, LEARNING FROM EACH OTHER:
Apply understanding to action.

2E. POLITICAL TALK ON THE GO: Turning our stories into conversations.

Educational safety and health.
• Democratic learning requires both risk-taking and respect.
• Safer space in organizations.
# Cultivate critical solidarity.
# Make room for new ideas.
• Explain what we mean.

Get it on the table.
• Some rules of engagement.
# Discussion takes time, but we’ve got to start the process somewhere.
# Political workers have to be as careful as anyone else of stereotyping folks.
# The environment has to be doubly safe.
# We can distinguish problem-solving talk from power plays.

• The chance to consider many sides of an issue strengthens our conclusions and political commitments.
# Acknowledge the dominant ideas.
"Omelet."
# Preempt the lies.

Raise questions.
• Question the sources, look behind the slogans.
• Highlight the contradictions, ask for explanations.

Tap into our repertoires and build on our strengths.

”Learning from experience takes practice.”

Generate alternatives.

Risk, cultivate, and systematize dissent.

Open up our stories.
• Pay attention to how we develop stories.
• Reconsider the frames of reference.
• Don’t act on crummy information.
# Don’t rely on self-serving information.
# Get a second opinion.
# Apply the right information to the question at hand.
# Listen for new insights.
# Don’t wait for perfect information, but don’t stop looking, either.
• Learn how to change our minds.
• Remember with purpose.

Weave our stories from the best materials.

Tell the truth.
• Talk beyond the slogans.
• Avoid double standards.
# Back up our claims.
# Resist romanticizing.
# Celebrate survival. Then organize for justice.
# Walk the walk.
# Explain how we apply our standards in different situations.

Think big.
• Data insufficient.
• Pandering is for pimps.
• Tiptoeing around the hard parts means stumbling in the dark.
• Mental maps are not fixed; we can redraw them.
• Put some meat on them bones.
• We can handle complex ideas.
• Connect the dots.
• Cut some doors in the walls; let the light in.
• Painting the big picture together.

Expand the spaces and opportunities for talk.


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2E. POLITICAL TALK ON THE GO: Turning our stories into conversations.

So those are some of the occasions, contexts and conditions for political talk. Given what we know about how we think and learn, and the circumstances of our political discussions, how can we best foster education for democracy?

Obviously structured encounters within longer-term relationships, personal or institutional, are more favorable to serious engagement on tough issues, but again, those cannot carry the entire educational burden. I want to suggest some approaches to learning that may help our political work. Some of these ideas are most appropriate to workshops or classes or other fairly structured situations, and are meant only to complement some tremendously valuable approaches already pioneered by very experienced community educators. (Still my favorite: Rick Arnold, Bev Burke, Carl James, D’Arcy Martin, Barb Thomas (1991). Educating for a change. Toronto: Doris Marshall Institute for Education and Action.) But I’m also seeking more portable practices, because we’ve got to take our educational opportunities where we can find them.


Educational safety and health.
Democratic movements in hierarchical societies need places and situations in which we can talk freely. Scott writes of the “hidden transcript,” the alternative understandings subordinate groups develop: “Here, offstage, where subordinates may gather outside the intimidating gaze of power, a sharply dissonant political culture is possible. Slaves in the relative safety of their quarters can speak the words of anger, revenge, self-assertion that they must normally choke back when in the presence of the masters and mistresses” (1990 p. 18). In our culture, even more saturated with the values of our masters, where we compete daily for their favor, where our roles in the big institutions encourage us to enclose our responsibilities in little boxes, where being a "team player" means keeping our mouths shut, where even our own accomplishments in music and art are quickly turned against us, we have to make a conscious effort to establish oases of truthful talk, and the skills to foster it.


• Democratic learning requires both risk-taking and respect .
It’s very hard to talk about our deepest fears and most cherished beliefs, so we really have to trust each other. For the folks who have been told all their lives that their experience is false or silly and doesn’t count anyway, it’s a very big step to talk about what they’ve seen and what they want.

Treating each other with respect doesn’t mean we have to dodge tough issues, but that we work hard to get the skills to talk about them effectively. My first understanding is that my neighbor is as capable as I of dealing with hard questions, and needs to just as much. At the same time, some circumstances are more favorable than others to this project, and we need to establish those. Many others have written more completely about political "safe spaces," but I can't write about education without touching on this subject.

Some people are just finding their voices and may need calm weather and plenty of space to try out their stories. All of us, however, need reassurance that we won’t be punished or ridiculed for what we say, or wildly misunderstood (the common and deeply discouraging experience of so many of the folks whose help I need). If as educators we conceive of our job as helping folks to clarify and extend their understandings, rather than “to confront people with their prejudices”, as my trainer friend put it, then we don’t have to worry so much about handholding and cajoling people along to Enlightenment. The strongest foundation for trust is that we take each other seriously; that I expect your words to matter, and mine to you.

In formal workshops folks can start by setting the rules for conversation: everybody gets a chance to speak, don’t make assumptions about other people’s motives, etc. --you may have seen the standard lists-- and hold each other to those.

Probably 90% of the success of a workshop results from the mix of participants --the variety of experience they bring, plus their understanding of and commitment to the goals of the discussion-- and that in turn stems from broadly participatory groundwork before the gathering, the question-raising and agenda-setting and recruiting. Moreover, the diversity we seek is not random, but reflects our understanding of who needs to work together at a given time.

I think too about not just having a wide range of views represented, but looking for a critical mass of each participating group. Usually one person is not enough to bring new information to a discussion. It’s hard for me to speak when I hear no echoes from other people; eventually I stop talking. I can certainly see that dynamic among students in my classes, where I’m in a position of authority. Especially when we’re dealing with religion or other political issues, the discussion is much more productive when the vocal students comfortably outnumber me. Then they’re much more ready to challenge me, to say what they really think, and also to listen closely to each other.

Far better are opportunities for political talk without any authorities around. We can be more honest then, both about our bosses and about our attitudes and work.

Those are more structured situations. When we’re grabbing opportunities at dinner or work or lining up at the toilet at the ball game, we’ve got to be prepared to listen to whatever is on folks’ minds, expecting only that they be ready to listen in turn. Here we have only a diversity of two. We can try to make up for that in a lame kind of way by referring to some of the folks who are absent. “Do you know So-and-so? What do you reckon she would say about this?”

It takes some skill to convey, but we can accept each others’ good intentions without necessarily agreeing to the premises or conclusions. If someone says, for instance, I can’t understand that person, I wish she’d speak proper English, it may be that the first speaker is hard to understand. Or it may be that the complainer doesn’t want to listen to a person of another class or ethnicity. I don’t always take at face value the first thing folks say, because we use lots of code phrases to mask feelings we’re ashamed of or confused about. Or when someone says, I’m doing it for the children, I feel obliged to dig deeper. Who is going to be better off in reality, and how?

I can't assume that I already know the right answers, and that the other person simply doesn’t want to tell me. Sometimes I can guess, but I’ve been wrong so often in the past that my guesses can at best only guide my questions. And sometimes people are willing to tell me more. It’s those explanations that help me understand how their experience relates to my own, and to the broader issues that affect us both. And even while pushing, I have to operate as if the other person is mostly just trying to figure things out, as I am.

Different folks are ready for different discussions at different times. Goldberger’s Women’s Ways of Knowing, while a bit vague at the boundaries and succession of the categories, represent stages of ways of thinking through which many of us move over time. One kind of conversation might help me now, and quite another two years from now; or tomorrow, in a different setting. WWK offers a vivid account of the professor who, in trying to make students more self-conscious of how they learn (similar to what I’m trying to do in parts of these essays), merely succeeded in making them distrust their own knowledge and turn that distrust against the professor.

‘You have just learned an important lesson about science. Never trust the evidence of your own senses.’ . . . He saw himself, perhaps, as inviting his students to embark upon an exciting voyage into the mysterious underworld invisible to the naked eye, accessible only through scientific method and scientific instruments. But the seventeen-year-old girl could not accept or even hear the invitation. Her sense of herself as a knower was shaky, and it was based on the belief that she could use her own firsthand experience as a source of truth. This man was saying that this belief was fallacious. He was taking away her only tool for knowing and providing her with no substitute. ‘I remember feeling small and scared,’ the woman says, ‘and I did the only thing I could do. I dropped the course that afternoon, and I haven’t gone near science since’ (191ff.)

Here the educator totally misread what this student needed, and blocked her way to getting it.

I mentioned doing a lesson on immigration with some of my GED students. To my surprise, the most thoughtful among them, a low income single mom, instead of seeing the immigrant experience as very much like her own, was very critical of immigrants and implicitly of me for prompting the discussion. I think in retrospect that she might have begun to think that my respect for her was grounded in an impersonal, stereotypically liberalish interest in working people (in this she was partly correct) and that to me she was interchangeable with the people in the textbook whom we’d never met (not correct). More generally, she might have felt that politics is a zero-sum game, that whatever helps or highlights one group must hurt another. She wasn’t ready for the conversation I was hoping for, and I wasn’t sure how to respond, but she was clearly thinking very hard about all this.

Some of my students --and some of my colleagues, too-- probably suffer from the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that affects so many survivors of war, or family violence, or corporate murder. They may have different priorities than the rest of us, and will be open to different kinds of conversations.

We don’t always have the same needs in terms of who we talk with, either. Clearly a lot of folks wouldn’t find it helpful to talk to me, because I know so little about their circumstances. Some try, nonetheless, and I try to understand. But in many cases I’m not the right person to be asking folks what they “really” mean.

One time I took part in a particularly disheartening dispute. A number of community groups from New York to New Orleans and lots of places in between got together to talk about environment problems and everything related; naturally, we got into talking about racism. I’ve been in a lot of such discussions, and they’re often difficult, but this was the least productive. Lots of people felt misunderstood and left the room. I think what happened here was that, in addition to the bitterness of the topic, we had folks from giant cities and tiny rural communities, and there was just a massive difference in the way people talked. We could understand each other’s words; it was the tone, the gestures, the forcefulness that got misread, mostly along the rural / urban divide. In this case the work of pushing each other’s ideas went (almost) totally astray.

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"In what ways do we press women to talk like us, think like us, fight like us: the Arab woman who is told by Anglo friends that she fights 'too angrily,' the Black woman who is thought to be 'too loud' by white women at a party. How does what we do differ from the obliteration practiced by the rest of the dominant culture?" (Pratt 49)
[Though it seems to me, that, in some settings, participants raised in the dominant culture can also feel obliterated; or there can be (there better be) participants from more than one culture outside the mainstream. So we all have to do a lot of translating.]
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Still has to be done, though, just as we are supposed to question ourselves. I’ve begun to realize that there is a specifically professional-class style of interrogating the world (“critical thinking” is one term; others might say something less flattering).* Nevertheless, we all have the need, the capacity, and therefore, I think, the practice of looking beneath the surface of what we say and write and believe; of seeking to understand the differences among the world, what we tell ourselves, and what we tell the people around us. That sort of examination is the foundation of better stories and more effective responses to the corruption that chokes us. And there are ways of questioning that do not undermine our respect for each other, that are reciprocal and not top-down.

Sometimes I’ve been able to push with some minor success. Once in the GED writing class I circulated a statement about sex education and asked learners to write their opinions. One woman suggested that sex education promotes teen pregnancy (bad). A Latina said, My culture discourages sex (good). A black woman said, We had sex ed and I’m pregnant anyway. We talked some more and I distributed tables showing a decline in teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. The tenor of the conversation started to shift. The Latina complained that men push women around. Another woman concluded ambitiously that, if she’d had sex education, she wouldn’t have gotten pregnant or stayed married to a guy who beat her. We didn’t have time to pull further on these threads, but I hope it gave folks the idea that there’s more than one way to talk about an issue (8/00).


I find, too, that even when folks start to get angry and defensive, so long as we remain engaged we may be listening intently and remembering (especially if we have occasion later on for further discussion). If we talk again next month or next year, maybe we’ll hear different things from each other. When I took classes in teaching English to immigrants, I learned that language learners typically undergo a “silent period,” in which they’re absorbing all sorts of language, but are not ready yet to speak. Then pretty suddenly they start talking a blue streak, with a good deal of skill. Seems like something like that might happen for any profound new understanding, including new political perspectives.

I don’t know if that’s what happened with the guy I met in budget class. When I worked at the social service agency, I used to hold one-session budget classes for people applying for help with their utility bills. A lot of folks resented having to take the class, and saw it as just another petty punishment for daring to ask for money.

One fella showed up even angrier than usual: Why do you make me do this, I have no money to budget, you have a nicer house than I, I know dozens of homeless vets, they threw me out of the utility company office, you won’t answer my questions, this class is punishment. He’d been in Viet Nam, he was disabled from a 65-foot fall, he had two kids on their way to Iraq 2.

He stayed after class for a few minutes. When I mentioned all the groups trying to change the economic policies he didn’t like, he dismissed them with the usual, You can’t fight city hall. He wondered aloud why the other staffer in the classroom, a young guy, wasn’t defending freedom like his own boys, and was surprised at the passionate reply; turns out my co-worker was a conscientious objector. The visitor complained bitterly about the president and was surprised again when I asked him why he’d send his kids to die for Bush. He didn’t answer, but he didn’t think it was a crazy question.

He left after a bit, thanking me for the class. He went away with the same problems and attitudes. Nevertheless, it made me think. He took me as seriously as I was taking him. He listened to me when I listened to him. We challenged each other and neither freaked out. In retrospect, I’m guessing that his militarism isn’t nearly as much a barrier to a more democratic politics, as his hopelessness. When did he adopt that excuse?

My main point here is that we as individuals are not so fragile. We are vulnerable (least so rich straight white boys like myself), but mostly pretty resilient, too. First, again, we have a big stake in solving our problems. Second, we have to cope with surprises and disappointments and threatening changes every day. All of us have always been learners, and at least to some extent we’re used to the stress of learning. Perhaps I’m thinking of my childhood with a passle of brothers and sisters. Kids are easily hurt, sometimes with lasting effect; but they also have an incredible facility for bouncing back. To get better at political conversations, what I need to do is understand better how folks have been hurt before, so I don’t just blunder around, aggravating old injuries.

Third, we help each other. This is hard work for all of us, and absolutely necessary.

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As the class went along, although people became more supportive, they also grew more and more critical. . . . People could criticize each other’s work in this class and accept each other’s criticisms because members of the group shared a similar experience. This is the only sort of expertise connected knowers recognize, the only sort of criticism they easily accept. Authority in connected knowing rests not on power or status or certification but on commonality of experience (Belenky 1986 p. 118).
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* Closely related to styles of critical thinking are differing expectations of personal malleability and change. Metzgar describes what a rough process it was for laid-off steel workers to òretooló themselves and their resumés for different work, at the direction of the career development professionals.

One of our best qualities as middle-class professionals is that we never think of ourselves as completed, as fixed entities with no further potential. . . . But working class culture emphasizes being and belonging, not achieving and becoming. . . (203).

The hard part was the idea that you could and should transform yourself. Most steelworkers did not want to transform themselves, even if they thought they could. Even worse, it seemed like a bad strategy, unnatural, to try to eliminate the weaknesses rather than to fit into a situation where your weaknesses are simply accepted because they could be offset by others’ strengths, just as your strengths helped offset others’ weaknesses (204).

In Metzgar’s estimation, our attitudes toward change are deeply rooted in the ways we relate to our communities.