If we want others to understand us, we have to first understand them
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Viewpoint diversity isn’t about trying to change someone’s mind. But if you can get people to be open to new ideas, having conversations with other people and being able to disagree in a way that is constructive rather than just being judgmental, that’s your best chance to change minds—and regardless, you understand more and coexist better.
- Erin McLaughlin
A friend sent me this article recently and I was inspired to write about it. It’s an interview between an educator and a journalist on the importance of understanding other people’s point of view before trying to change any one’s minds.
This is a concept that hits close to home for me. I believe in it. I teach it and I try to practice it every day.
Understanding someone doesn’t mean we must agree with their worldviews or convert to their ideologies or repent for our own beliefs.
This is a simple, yet a very hard concept to discuss and to practice. We are taught to judge, and our society values discernment, decisiveness of thoughts and actions, moral judgment on behaviours and the ensuing accountability of that behaviour.
We are seldom taught to suspend judgment while we are listening to someone. We learn to prepare counter-arguments or supporting arguments for what others tell us.
I think this is a very normal way of thinking and acting, especially since it is valued so highly in our society. The analytical mind contributes to our progress, but so does a listening mind and heart.
Let me tell you a story about my own journey.
Early in my teaching career, I had a tense and an impactful discussion with a friend and a colleague about the function of a teacher in a classroom.
My friend and I were having a heated discussion of whether it is more important to create a ‘safe space’ in the classroom as to protect the vulnerable population of the students and to give space to them to voice their opinions, or to create a space where any one of the students can freely but respectfully express their thoughts for discussion, even if those thoughts were controversial or ‘wrong’.
I was arguing for having a ‘safe space’ and my friend was arguing for having a space to express their thoughts.
I argued that as a racialized woman, I knew first-hand what it’s like to not be able to have space to contribute, to feel excluded by opinions and people who expressed those opinions and I remember saying so clearly that I would rather protect ‘the young gay kid, who might be deciding to come out in his first year of university than some white, heterosexual guy who wanted to express his moral opinions on homosexuality’.
My friend argued that as a racialized man, but specially as a man, he would much rather his student express his moral opinions on sexuality and have those arguments dispelled through critical discourse, than him feeling silenced in the classroom and then going online and seeking very dangerous and damaging information that would confirm his own views anyway.
I argued and he argued.
We were both much younger and so passionate about doing the right thing by our students. We couldn’t agree so we stormed off, each leaving the building in the opposite direction.
We would later talk about how difficult that conversation was and how much we were both fuming after it and even seeking other friends’ and colleagues’ opinions on the topic.
That conversation never left me, because we were both right.
There was something of a truth in what my friend was arguing that nagged me for years and there is still something of a truth in my own thoughts around creating a space that my students wouldn’t feel afraid of expressing themselves.
But something shifted in me over my years of teaching, and this shift came about from a fundamental understanding that if one lives in a settler-colonial state, where the foundations of the state were rooted in the supremacy of the white folks who settled on the land, and more specifically the supremacy of the British folks who were here, and if what created our society was on the backs of enslaved people, on the shoulders of the Chinese labourers, on the destruction of Indigenous cultures of the land, and on the subjugation of woman, how could this society and everyone in it not be influenced by racism, sexism, classism, and the colonialism of the land? How could each of us not be influenced and therefore not, at the very least, be a little racist, sexist, or classist? If the space that we are in is filled with the smog of capitalism, how could we breathe that air and not possibly get affected by it?
This shift in my own understanding changed me.
I started my classes with myself:
‘I am a feminist, yes… I believe in socialism and state welfare, I am anti-racist and practice that everyday, AND I operate on the assumptions that everyone in this room, including myself is at least a little bit racist, sexist, classist, etc. by the virtue of existing in this society. Our job is to notice when we do something that we consider is wrong, and to correct the course.’
I started by saying that no one will be scapegoat-ed for what they said, and although we will judge an idea but we will not judge the person behind the idea. I also said that once someone has said something that I considered to be ‘wrong’, we will pause the class and discuss it collectively. I told them that I understood that if they have lived in a particular space with a particular set of beliefs for the past 18, 19, 20 years of their lives (or longer), it would take longer than a two-hour class to dispel some of those myths and that we would do them together.’
And I also did say, that once we have thoroughly talked about what was said, once the knowledge was in the room and ideas were fully discussed, then I would have higher expectations of the student’s understanding and would expect them to refrain from saying what I thought was ‘wrong’.
I did something else simultaneously.
I started talking about my personal experiences interspersed with theory. I would never again talk about Remembrance Day just as a way of glorifying war, rather I would talk about my own experiences of war and tell my students what wars do to civilians and leave it to them to decide for themselves what kind of remembering they wanted to do.
I would never again talk about patriarchy and female beauty without giving my own examples of how I would resist by not shaving my legs and what would that resistance be met with by others, or for how long I would try to recreate the pin-up girl make-up look of the 1950s without fully understanding that I could never achieve that because I wasn’t white and my recreation of wanting to live up to an ideal of female beauty left me with less time, less money, and lower self-esteem.
These two techniques combined changed my classrooms.
I could feel it in the class and see it in the evaluations I was given.
My students showed up class after class to discuss important and emotionally charged topics.
And the interesting part: never in the years since I have practiced this, someone has said something so racist, sexist, classist or homophobic that I had to pause the class to address it.
I learned what my friend was trying to tell me that day at a building in McMaster University: if you don’t teach ‘viewpoint diversity’ any anti-oppressive theory, practice, or training might take on a performative aspect, and once the political climate of the time changes, people throw away the cloak of that ARAO performance and revert back to their original thoughts and behaviours. And often with more gusto than before. I saw that so clearly in 2015-2016 with the rise of Donald Trump.
So I will leave you with 3 crucial points from the article:
Practice understanding your own viewpoints and the viewpoints of others.
Cultivate intellectual humility that your worldview is incomplete and biased. Be curious about what others have to teach you.
Develop an actively open-minded way of thinking so you can learn from and speak to those whose viewpoints that are different than yours.
