Questions, Answers, and Learning About The World

Pearl K. Wise Library Windows

It happened during an assembly in the Cambridge Rindge and Latin (CRLS) high school library. Approximately 150 students and many teachers were on hand to listen to a panel of three students who had recently immigrated to the United States. The panelists were going to share their experiences of life in a new school and country and their ideas about how their classmates and teachers, most American born and bred, might better support their ongoing adjustment.

The youngest panelist was a ninth-grade boy from Ghana. I remember admiring his poise: addressing “older kids” and teachers in a language I was still learning would have terrified me at his age. But there was Charles* sharing a prepared statement and fielding questions from the audience.

It was all going smoothly—lots of sharing about the challenges of navigating new cultures in the classroom and the lunchroom—and then, during the question-and-answer segment of the program, one of my colleagues who is passionate about the social and academic success of all our students spoke up. Since the Boston Marathon bombing—the Tsarnaev brothers graduated from CRLS—a number of us on the faculty had been feeling more intensely that we and our students who’d lived only in America needed to know more about the places from which our immigrant students and their families had come. I suspect this teacher’s question reflected both this concern and her desire to affirm Charles as a thoughtful individual. 

“Do you think people should learn about your country?” she asked.   

Charles shifted in his seat. Finally, he replied, “No, I don’t think they have to.”

I looked at another colleague who was also deeply committed to the thriving of all CRLS students. She was a native of Kenya who regularly helped students in her African literature course to recognize their often stereotypical assumptions about Africa and to replace them with informed understandings. What had she thought of Charles’s response? She seemed to be scanning the crowd. I wondered if she was hoping that some student in the audience would offer a contrasting opinion. 

Finally, she herself spoke up, gently but firmly. “You come from a country that’s very important for people to know about. Many enslaved Africans in the Americas came from the areas now known as Ghana, Togo, Nigeria, etc.—and many people of African descent are interested in learning more about where their ancestors came from.”** 

She didn’t speak for long. My impression was that she had felt an obligation to set the record straight about Ghana’s significant role in historical events that continue to reverberate in the present, but that she also was reluctant to “correct” Charles. After all, he’d been asked his opinion in the moment as part of a public event.  And after all, he was only fourteen years old: how many fourteen-year-olds would feel entitled to say to an authority figure, “I need some time to think about that” or “I think I need to learn more before I can answer that”? It was also possible that he hadn’t heard the question the same way his native-English-speaker peers had: as an English language learner, he might easily have understood “should they learn about Ghana” as “must they learn about Ghana,” instead of as “would it be good idea for them to learn about Ghana.”

Frankly, I can think of many other reasons that Charles might have answered as he did—some of which make me wonder how much Charles believed his own answer. 

There are several ways that we and our students become globally educated, especially when the goal is develop the global competence essential to our becoming active, engaged global citizens who can work together to create a better world for all.

• We can learn from travel experiences that bring us to the places and people we want to understand more, learn with, and work with to solve problems.
• We can learn at home or in school from the arts, from the media, from print resources—anything that brings the world beyond our national borders into our personal worlds.
• We can learn through authentic interpersonal exchange—online and face-to-face--with those who live in, come from, or understand other places.

As NEA Foundation Global Learning Fellows in 2012, a group of us from all over the USA had the chance to develop a greater understanding of Chinese education, culture, and life in all three of these ways. One of the biggest lessons I took from the experience, however, is that authentic exchange between strangers is often not easily achieved, especially when the context is a designated question-and-answer period.

As travelers to China, we were advised to ask our most penetrating questions privately rather than publicly. It was advice we heeded generally. But one morning during a Q&A session in a school in Shanghai, a member of our group asked what must have felt like a penetrating question to the Chinese educators who were hosting us: “If there was something you could change about this school, what would it be?”

There was silence and shifting in seats; our Chinese colleagues looked furtively at one another, but not at the local government officials who were also present. 

Finally, one teacher spoke up: “We could not think of anything about this school that we would wish to change.”

Later in the day, the teacher who’d asked the question quipped, “Not even a different kind of chalk?” I don’t think any of us believed the answer we’d heard. We did understood, though, that deliberate inauthentic exchange—the sharing of "information" or "opinions" meant to obscure facts, conceal personal feelings, or satisfy one’s superiors—also produces understandings of other people and places.

Thanks to such tools as the Right Question Institute’s Question Formulation Technique and various Project Zero-developed Thinking Routines*** that require students to wonder and probe, many American students have become skilled at asking high quality questions that drive learning. Some have also become highly adept at asking follow-up questions. But that doesn’t mean that all of their well-considered questions should be asked directly. Nor does it mean that they should expect complete or truthful answers to their questions in the moment. In some settings and circumstances, answering such questions directly can be highly uncomfortable—or downright dangerous.

Imagine Charles for one minute more. Assuming he felt an obligation to answer the question he’d been asked, what else might have been going through his head? Perhaps he was wondering if there was a “right” answer and what it was. Perhaps he was wishing he knew more about Ghana; after all, what fourteen-year-old has had the chance to develop a critical knowledge of his own country or any other country? Perhaps he was frightened of giving the impression that he was critical of America, especially at a time when immigrants were being viewed with increasing suspicion. Perhaps he had been explicitly instructed by a family member to say little or nothing about Ghana to those who might misunderstand it or him.    

Interestingly, not one of us in the audience that day asked Charles what he wanted to ask us. When the principal of a new orphanage school in Kampala, Uganda asked the third-graders in one classroom what questions they had for two of us who were visiting from America, the first student to raise his hand asked a factual question that spoke volumes: “Do you have parents?” 

Reflections High Above Shanghai*****

Would Charles have offered a different answer to the question he was asked if a classmate—or even his own teacher—had asked him the same question in a classroom filled with other students whom he had come to know over time? Or if a fellow student had asked him the same question in a small group within the classroom? Maybe. Or maybe he would have given the same answer, but followed it with some explanation. Maybe eventually, all the students in the class would have shared what they thought “other people” needed to learn about their countries of origin. 

Authentic exchange, especially across national and cultural boundaries, is never just about good questions or sincere invitations to participate in it. It’s about relationships and trust. It’s about alertness to perspectives. It’s about access to language that can sufficiently express thinking and feeling. It doesn’t just happen: the relationships, expressive abilities, and classroom cultures that best support it—like the global understandings they seek to create—need time and strategic attention to develop.****

Welcome to CRLS, November 2013

By now, Charles has graduated from CRLS. As I think back to that panel discussion, I find myself wondering how the more mature, more educated Charles would answer the question he was asked that day (at least) four years ago: would he think that Americans should learn about Ghana? That still might depend on who was asking and why, who was listening, and how he was being asked.

* I am calling him “Charles”; actually, I can’t remember his name.

** I reached out to the teachers mentioned above to confirm my recollections of this event. My second colleague shared with me how Charles might have understood the word "should."
*** One set of thinking routines, called Global Thinking Routines, particularly support the development of global competence.
**** There could be a whole other blog post on this topic alone!

***** In 2012, the tallest building in Shanghai was The Shanghai World Financial Center.