ABSTRACT
When I participated in the International Conference on Special Education in Beijing in 1988 I was struck by the absence of questions. We learned about one another by presenting statements from our own culture. Given the huge variety of aims, values and social contexts of the papers, making connections between these statements was impossible. I abandoned the task I had been set by the organisers to draw out themes for discussion and instead asked my group what they wanted to know about the lives of overseas colleagues and to frame their own questions. We moved away from statements about our own country to questions about another.
