As a teacher, I enter the pedagogical relationship through my own experience, which includes my formative experiences in the world, my training, and my aspirations for both myself and my students. So too does each of my students enter the pedagogical relationship in such a way. Unless there can be a sharing of these stories as a condition of our coming together, there can be no basis for our mutual advancement because it remains perpetually impossible to know who is talking; without such knowledge, what is present to be learned can only remain detached and alienated from those involved. In the Advanced Curriculum Research course for doctoral students at the University of Alberta, for example, both students and professor participate in the Who Is the One Researching? (WITOR) project. Members work together to clarify the relations between their own biographies and the respective research projects that holds their interest. The effect of such efforts is two fold. On the one hand, actually hearing the stories of others becomes a liminal reminder of the impossibility of corralling all of these stories into one conceptual or interpretive schema, except of course the schema of difference. On the other hand, it is precisely the schema of difference that brings people to an awareness of the need for deep tolerance and acceptance—the qualities without which there can be no community, no sense of common belonging. Sometimes the conundrum inspired by the irony is the site of provocation—a prelude for hermeneutic breakthrough. This was the case, for example, in another class discussing an article on gay and lesbian experience. Students from China reacted in horror to the possible sociocultural acceptance of gays and lesbians, relating stories from their own cultures of how such people are treated. Facing a lesbian student in the class, someone who had already gained their respect and trust before coming out induced a genuine sense of bewilderment and puzzlement, a new genuine openness to learning, and a reciprocal sharing of assumptions and understandings about sexuality generally.
The sharing of horizons can easily become stuck in a kind of self-aggrandizing narcissism if an effort is not vigilantly made to show how the dynamic at work in the pedagogical situation has reference in the broader world. That is, the sharing of horizons points to the way my horizon is never just my horizon, but one that opens out onto that of another and, as such, is in a condition of perpetual revision toward a more comprehensive understanding and appreciation of the broader world. In this instance is gained the appreciation for how no one story can tell the whole story, and that hermeneutic suspicion is best directed at pretensions to the same—pretensions to a univocal and monological theory of globalization, for example. The economistic determinism at the heart of the neo-liberal agenda of Globalization One must be exposed for the way it limits other ways of human expression and common living (e.g., through aesthetics, spirituality, and altruism). The sharing of horizons within communities of difference helps break down the dichotomy between the private and public spheres, and may serve as a kind of prelude to a theory of justice that honors difference while holding every difference accountable to its influence in the broader public realm. It is one thing to hold private views and to honor the right to privacy for those views. Yet in the age of globalization, where persons and groups now rub shoulders in new and unforeseen ways, the time may soon be near when more open expression of personal convictions is necessitated by the requirement to understand more fully and more publicly the lived-out implications of privately held (including privately held by groups and communities) beliefs. In my graduate seminar on religious and moral education, for example, each person is encouraged to publicly articulate the convictions of their own faith community regarding other faith communities. This becomes a means of facing difference, lifting it out of the realm of abstraction and conceptualization, and embodying it in relations between persons. It is one thing for a Seventh Day Adventist student to state as an abstract principle of theology for his faith community that “the Pope is the Antichrist”; it is quite another to state it while facing directly a Roman Catholic friend and colleague in the class, surrounded
by others now deeply invested in the outcome of such facing. These others are invested partly because the future of the class—its tone, its pedagogical receptiveness, its future possibilities as a place of secure freedom—depends on it. They are also invested because they recognize in such a confrontation an exemplification of their own relations of difference, so that the outcome of this specific case becomes prototypical for the resolution of their own personal challenges.
This kind of outing of difference also assists in helping students better understand the way their assumptions about others are historically constructed; as such, they must be reexamined and re-interrogated for their time boundedness. Of course, historicization as a strategy for opening dialogue contains its own theory of history, and it must be recognized that it does not work well within and among communities where history is taught as a rigid anamnesis—a memorization of how we got to this point as a way of legitimizing why at this point we should never change. Resolving that difficulty must be reserved for another day; here the pedagogical assumption is that history is open or better, that the future is always open, and that an orientation in the present to an open future is an absolutely necessary precondition not only for a world that is more fair and just, but also for one that may be inspired by hope. One of the conditions, then, that the sharing of horizons brings into the classroom can be called the condition of mnemonic reparation, which has special relevance for curriculum in the age of globalization. Nigerian playwright, essayist, novelist, and poet, Wole Soyinka (2000), has called for an international movement to make possible a new kind of reparation in the world for past wrongs, past injustices. This new kind of reparation would not be monetary (“Reparation is not monetary recompense”), but a recovery and making public of the subjugated memories of oppressed peoples. For an example, Soyinka pointed to the UNESCO commitment to the preservation of the slave routes in West Africa, establishing a scientific committee to document, preserve, and open up the landmarks of the slave routes for posterity. In such a way, Africans around the world can better concretize their history to turn it into a living voice within the emerging global community. Also, such mnemonic acts reveal the interdependent nature of every identity.
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