ABSTRACT
Every teacher worth her words knows how deeply she has learned from her students: how being open and accessible in that space she and her students occupy—which is neither public nor fully private, but sometimes the best of both, which can feel secularly sacred—cannot help but change her, make her wider. I believe that the goal of education is, in Maxine Hong Kingston’s words, “to make my mind large as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes” (35). My classroom is the place where students, in their variety of thoughts, questions, reflections, in their diverse spoken and written languages, present the challenge to make my imagination large enough to create an inclusive environment for them. Here, in this place of intellectual improvisation, I am forced to become porous, to enter a liminal world created in this moment of spontaneous interaction that has never been before and never will occur again. Here, in this place of chaos and uncertainty, I am being taught, actually forced, to listen for difference. Here I am learning to avoid indulging what is at times my own and my students’ overwhelming desire to focus on similarity, to identify like experience and feeling, to merge. Here I work not to flee but rather to inhabit those areas of faulty or partial comprehension, where we are left without closure. Nothing in my education, nothing I can remember being taught at home or at school or in this culture at large has prepared me for this work.
