Listening As Letting Go of Comfort and Embracing Difference: Responsibilities of the Listener in Freedom of Expression

Cassandra Farrin

Introduction and Process

When I came to Willamette University as a student in 2001, I had no interest in Asian culture. Then in the spring of 2002 I met Nao Kawakami,¹ a tough and funny girl with big dreams for her future, who happened to be a student at Tokyo International University of America (TIUA) and also happened to be deaf. Our friendship blossomed by chance one night when Nao wandered by my open door. My friendship with her later inspired me to get involved with the TIUA community. I have never looked back with regret on the path our friendship led me to take, because becoming familiar with a context outside the one in which I grew up has humbled and challenged me to think about how I approach difference. If Nao’s unique situation had not required me to get to know her as an individual in order to get to know her at all, I would have missed out on her friendship. I would also have missed getting to know the many students who followed her, because I learned from her that every person, even if described by the same title as others—whether it be “TIUA student,” “Willamette student” or anything else—has his or her own story to tell. Several years and hundreds of TIUA students later, I have found that there can be no rushing through each person’s story to get it ‘out of the way,’ no assumption that we have already ‘heard it all before,’ and no dismissal of its unique value, even if it is downplayed by the person himself or herself. The immense impact this knowledge has had on my understanding of the world is what leads me to write this reflection on freedom of expression: We must all consider how we can best relate to, support, challenge, and engage every member of our community as listeners and respondents to difference—a role that we occupy more often than we realize.

I will begin this reflection on how diversity and freedom of expression are connected, and from there, move on to why we should pay attention to the ways we listen in light of the above discussion. After that, I will put forward suggestions about a set of expectations that we as a community could set for ourselves about how we listen, by considering what we do when we face situations in which we are uncomfortable with the idea of or actual conversations with people who are different from us. This set of expectations are just as they sound: expectations, not rules or regulations, that we as a community might hold up as a standard for treating others with dignity and respect. As our Associate Chaplain Karen Wood has been known to say, “We don’t learn by doing; we learn by thinking about what we have done.” I finish by reflecting on my experiences with TIUA students on campus and sharing some of their comments and stories relevant to this subject, sincerely hoping that readers will do the same in their own areas of interaction in whatever place they designate as their community.

Within this discussion, I wish to share the bravery and creativity demonstrated by TIUA students, as individuals and as a group, in integrating into our community, in part thanks to a great deal of support from their peers, staff, and faculty, as an example of the incredible contribution that providing structure and support for exploring difference can bring to our community. The nature of an exchange program is such that the exchange student must, in order to be successful, invest all his or her courage in the act of leaping into a new and relatively unknown culture. As Jeani Bragg, Associate Director of Co-Curricular and Intercultural Education at TIUA², said to me recently, “We are not meeting the TIUA students halfway.” Metaphorically speaking as well as physically, TIUA students travel much further than we must in order to befriend us, gain our respect, and communicate who they are and what they contribute to our community. It is possible that some readers know very little about the TIUA program while others may be long-time friends and acquaintances. In either case, maintaining awareness can help all of us to be more empathetic to each student’s efforts without undermining his or her intellect and preparedness as a student, and that openness in turn can help us create an atmosphere in which TIUA students—along with so many other courageous students with equal need for recognition and support on our campus—are able to express themselves more freely.

Beginning to Consider Our Responsibilities in Our Diverse Community

The difficulties of integration faced by TIUA students and other minority groups on campus are experiences that we may all come across at different times in our lives, but that some of us will come across more often than others based on our background and situation. How can we respond to minority members of our community and offer them the support they need as opposed to our own idea of what support they need? We cannot say fairly about the minority student, “She decided to put herself into this situation by enrolling in this institution, so her struggles with adjusting to those differences are her own issue.” As an educator, I cannot accept such a response, which is based on an assumption that members of the community who express dissatisfaction with “the way things are” brought the problem upon themselves and will work on solving it themselves, so that eventually members of the privileged group—who are already comfortable and don’t believe they are also hurt by a system that silences and discomfits other community members—can accept the change passively as it comes, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their daily lives. Even if members of the privileged group take notice of the problem and want to demonstrate solidarity or a desire to help, they might only go as far as to say, “Tell us what you need us to do and we’ll get to work on it,” implying that those who complain have first, the responsibility and ability to tell everyone how to make things better, and second, the sense of security to do so without fearing repercussions or simply being ignored. Paolo Freire explains:

The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They cannot see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an unalienable right, a right they acquired through their own ‘effort,’ with their ‘courage to take risks.’ If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the ‘generous gestures’ of the dominant class. Precisely because they are ‘ungrateful’ and ‘envious,’ the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched (Freire 1970, 59).

The language of Freire may come across as threatening to those of us who ‘have more’ on this campus; the language of the ‘oppressor’ and ‘oppressed’ may seem like something from a third-world country or a country at war, not a standard that a modern university setting might harbor. Does this exist on the Willamette University campus? The strongest evidence of this inequality on our campus is that, even though a group of nearly one hundred Asian students—the students of TIUA—on our campus has an entire staff of no fewer than 30 people working 40 hours per week to create a smooth integration process for them to the best of our ability, with sometimes successful and sometimes not so successful results, Willamette University has only a single staff person helping all the multicultural students on our campus. Students have expressed the need for more support from staff and have not gotten it except from staff members who choose to support them from their own personal experience or a desire to help, not through the University itself. Oppression exists anywhere where some people have more resources and opportunities as well as a higher level of comfort with their surroundings, than others.

As educators we have a responsibility not only to be aware of the dynamics of our campus and the message those dynamics send to our students, but also to teach our students how to work through their encounters with difference. To do so, though, we have to be able to do the same thing successfully: “Aware that there are dimensions of difference with which we are not yet knowledgeable or comfortable, we [must commit] ourselves—as individuals and colleagues—to continue to confront our uncertainties” (Kingston-Mann and Sieber 2001, 4). If we don’t know where we are on the spectrum of responses to difference, we will not be able to help our students. In an article rethinking the role of White Americans in multicultural education, Gary Howard explains, “Racism is not a Black problem or an Indian problem or an Asian problem or a Hispanic problem—or even a White problem. The issue of racism and cultural diversity in the United States is a human problem, a struggle we are all in together. It cannot be solved by any one group. We have become embedded in the problem together, and we will have to deal with it together” (Howard 1996, 330). Knowing this, we need to continually practice our own responses to difference and think about how we as teachers shape the cultural understanding of our students.

Dr. Milton Bennett created the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity “as a framework to explain the reactions of people to cultural difference” (Bennett and Hammer 1998). Bennett’s goal was to create a model that could be used by trainers and educators to “diagnose stages of development for individuals or groups, to develop curriculum relevant to particular stages, and to sequence activities in ways that facilitate development toward more sensitive stages” (Bennett 1993, 24). There are six stages broken into two areas: Ethnocentric and Ethnorelative Stages. The first set of stages is called Ethnocentric because a person in these stages in some way experiences his or her culture as “central to reality:” Denial, Defense, and Minimization. The second set of stages is called Ethnorelative because the person in these stages experiences his or her culture “in the context of other cultures:” Acceptance, Adaptation, and Integration. We can move through all these stages, get stuck in one stage, or even revert back to a stage through which we earlier passed, because people’s responses to difference are constantly changing based on their life experiences. Ultimately, the goal of an intercultural educator is to help students work through these varying stages both conceptually and practically, maintaining awareness of their own biases and cultural beliefs and values, so that they can become more sensitive toward the impact of differences on communication and learn how to successfully set and reach their goals in a conversation across those differences.

I bring up the Experience of Difference in a conversation that is ultimately about freedom of expression in a multicultural and democratic society because we simply cannot define the appropriateness of different words and actions in our community based only on how comfortable or uncomfortable they make us feel. Discomfort is inherent in the experience of difference, no matter how much we dislike the feeling. Educators cannot afford to fall back on emotional responses to an issue at moments when our students—and sometimes fellow faculty and staff—are asking us to see how our actions and words undermine their right to be different from us and each other. If we are not well-versed in the dynamics of multicultural settings, we can neither model for, nor teach, our students to navigate the complexities found there.

Locating members of an audience who make an effort both to ‘get it’ and take action in response to what a person proposes in light of our diverse society can prove difficult without doing something to startle or otherwise catch the attention of community members. In these cases, the work of locating an audience essentially falls on the person who wishes to speak. This is the responsibility of the speaker but, at the same time, his dilemma. He has to grapple with his concern that the only way to make positive change is to focus on how he can effectively reach dominant groups in his community and make them understand his ideas. Too often, this reinforces the demand that he conform to the expectations of dominant groups by using their vocabulary and means of communication instead of his own.

Why Talk about Listening in a Conversation about Freedom of Expression?

In response to recent events on the Willamette University campus, much discussion has gone into how we should define “freedom of expression.” The questions that arise often focus on such issues themselves: How far should this freedom extend? What forms of expression are appropriate in our community? In light of the diversity of our community (both within the university and our greater cultural context), where can we draw a boundary of what is acceptable, if any such boundary is to be drawn at all? These are legitimate questions that need to be explored, but I hope that we can exercise caution toward the implication carried in the term “freedom of expression” as some form of outward production, such as speech or action. It is tempting to think that any responsibilities associated with exercising that freedom lie solely with the person speaking or acting and, therefore, that discussion of expectations regarding freedom of expression should focus on those who exercise their right to it.

Directing our expectations onto the speaker alone risks isolating our questions about freedom of expression into a separate sphere from where they actually occur: in the dynamic of dialogue and interaction between human beings in real, lived contexts with real, lived complexities, in which people respond to the words and actions of others and, in doing so, contribute to the exchange in both negative and positive ways. Even forms of media such as cartoons, articles, or television programs influence and incite discussion of difference in communities, so our expectations must be directed away from those of us who do the talking and shift to those of us who do (or do not) listen and respond in return. At some point we have to turn to our audience, in its scattered and disorganized form, and teach the audience to take some responsibility, not in any one particular instance, but in general, by expecting more of our audience, that is, thinking more about how we listen and respond to others in our community.

The difficult thing about listening is that we cannot control whether someone listens to us. The listener, therefore, has influence over the ways in which people choose to express themselves: their language, their communication style, and the contexts in which they speak. There is a physical side to listening, but also a cognitive side. Our own ideas and expectations can deafen us to hearing anything besides what we want to hear, and we can reject something that doesn’t make sense to us or makes us upset, confused, or otherwise uncomfortable. Just as in the Experience of Difference we can move through ethnocentric and ethnorelative stages, we only see what we are open to seeing, based on the story we tell ourselves about ourselves and our world. “Our stories are built in often unconscious but systematic ways. First, we take in information. We experience the world—sights, sounds, and feelings. Second, we interpret what we see, hear, and feel; we give it all meaning. Then we draw conclusions about what is happening. At each step, there is an opportunity for different people’s stories to diverge” (Stone, Patton, and Heen 2000, 30). This has a direct impact on the ways we choose to listen to others, often in ways of which we are not even aware, and, in turn, on the ways we choose to respond to people when they try to express something about their experiences in our community that differ from our own. If we believe ourselves to be basically nice people who do not discriminate and who live in a basically fair society, we are not likely to notice the moments when we are responsible for discriminatory acts, expressions of bias, or exertions of privileges that come from certain demographic characteristics that we happen to possess. We may never have learned about the differences in the experience of other people, so we may be unable to comprehend those differences when someone attempts to show them to us. As a result, while there may be times when labeling a form of expression “inappropriate” is a necessary act for the safety and integrity of our community, there may also be times when we do so as an expression of power and privilege over others, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes we may even believe we are upholding the safety and integrity of our community when really all we’re doing is upholding the integrity of an oppressive element of our community that ought to be changed or removed.

This is a humbling truth: diversity is complex, constantly changing, and difficult to navigate, so asking members of a community to become more aware of that fact is equal to asking them to notice their own oppressive behaviors, even though doing so challenges the status quo and threatens community members with “losing” privileges that they believe rightfully belong to them. Inevitably, this will force members of dominant groups in our community to be extremely uncomfortable from time to time, more often than we’d like, and to work through that discomfort to find a better situation for the whole community. “It is necessary and even urgent that the school become a space to gather and engender certain democratic dispositions, such as the disposition to listen to others—not as a favor but as a duty—and to respect them” (Freire 2005, 116-7). Educators face a huge challenge in creating and supporting such an environment, where one’s own emotions and desire for control in a situation can take over one’s awareness of the Other.

In an article describing her experiences teaching privileged students to understand society from the ‘minority position,’ Christine E. Sleeter states, “Multicultural teaching is not simply a list of teaching strategies. Rather, it is an orientation to listening to oppressed people, including scholars, with the aim of learning to hear and understand what is being said, building dialog, and learning to share decision-making power with oppressed communities” (Sleeter 1995, 432-3). Communities, particularly those that value the education of the whole person, have an opportunity to become both more conscious and conscientious of diversity by considering what we can expect from our community when we try to make a statement about something. That is what I seek to do here, with the understanding that brainstorming a set of expectations is neither the same as bringing them into the lived experience of our community, nor is it the only inspiration needed to encourage everyone to take a look at the social atmosphere of the university and recognize what oppressive aspects are to be found in it.

I promise to at least begin with the assumption that what the speaker has to say is important (whether or not I am proven wrong in this assumption later), recognizing that there is more to every situation than what meets the eye.
I promise to listen with humility. I promise to listen toward understanding and toward what I don’t yet know.
I promise to seek a deeper understanding of the other person by considering the meaning and intentions behind what is said, not stopping at the words or actions alone, and, in doing so, discover how I can relate with him or her (Adler 1983, 91).
I promise to consider my response and make an appropriate one.

These four phrases are generated out of my own experiences, mostly with TIUA students, and from personal reflection and research on how listening is connected to education, diversity, and oppression. I did not set out to learn, and in some cases resisted, when I stumbled across these ideas in my practical work, but have found over time that following them has helped me to get to know and respect each student individually where I would have been otherwise tempted to act based on stereotypes. This list is not exhaustive, nor does it fully satisfy problematic aspects of the relationship between speaker and listener in a diverse community. What it does seek to do, though, is to begin a conversation about what we can expect from each other and thereby help us all to become more aware of how we tend to interpret our interactions with one another. Not designed to be enforced, the above expectations are ideas that can be called upon and used as a means to encourage approaches that seek understanding and ways to improve a situation, or to object to approaches that send a dehumanizing or oppressive message. They are meant to provide a first step in a conversation about the ways we listen to one another so that we can improve our discourse in the future. At the same time, any statement, verbal or nonverbal, can be used as a form of oppression based on the context in which it is used, so to some extent this list of expectations will never be absolute, and it was never my intention to make them so.

In How to Speak, How to Listen, Mortimer J. Adler entitles his chapter on listening, “The Mind’s Ear,” arguing that “listening, like reading, is an activity primarily of the mind, not of the ear or eye” (Adler 1983, 85). In light of Bennett’s description of the Experience of Difference, we can see that our perspective toward and understanding of the Other will have a direct impact on our ability to listen to him or her. It is damaging and disrespectful to the speaker if we, the listeners, come into the conversation with the assumption that what she has to say is only about herself and her own actions or about some other world that is totally alien and disconnected from ours and is in someway irrelevant to us. Instead, we must “have at least the intellectual courtesy of initially assuming that what is being said is of sufficient interest and importance to be worthy of attention,” and, beyond that, “the listener must come to terms with the speaker…[by] discovering what the idea is regardless of how it is expressed in words” (91). We must seek the meaning and significance in the speaker’s words and consider how she meant her words to be taken even if our natural inclination may be to take her words differently. A person’s value system, background, culture, personal history, sexual orientation, and manner of speaking may be completely different from our own, but if we find ourselves in a conversation, we will still need to negotiate our way through our differences in order to understand each other, beginning with the assumption that the other person has something to say that is worthy of our attention.

We need to seek what we don’t know or understand yet, to the very best of our ability. In daily life, we tend to assume that everyone shares the same basic experience of the community—even though it would be nice to change some things, change is not viewed as necessary, or even encouraged, if one’s perspective is that things are “basically comfortable” as they are now. In reality, some people may not be comfortable and may even feel that they are not welcome based on certain aspects of their identity, and we need to recognize that. This reality is what we, as members of a diverse community, need to keep in mind as the context for freedom of expression. What people say and do does not happen independently of that context, so we need to consider how it arose from that context and is connected to it.

Listening can be used as a means of figuring out context. By listening, we learn how to relate to others. Listening brings us one step closer to being able to acknowledge that a person’s identity is just as wrapped up in the complex influences of family, ethnicity, work, and interests as our own are. To some extent, it is not possible to move beyond superficial relationships without encountering and educating oneself about a person’s cultural and social background. We can work toward equality by being an active participant in the other person’s reality, even when we are not comfortable with areas of difference between us. Even in that uncomfortable space, between us there can be a shared understanding that I will get to know and respect that person and she will get to know and respect me. I will try to learn her cultural references, and she will try to learn mine, so that we can connect those references and understand one another’s perspectives. This approach enables us to see the larger picture of our community, that is, its context, and to begin shaping that context together.

A Case Study: How Listening Has an Impact on Intercultural Exchange

Through many interactions, I have found that learning more about the context of my TIUA students and friends leads me to relate to them better because I’m able to translate it into my own context and relate to their cultural references. Our ability to mutually understand our differing cultural references enables our understanding of one another to be deepened and takes our conversations to a more complex level, even when we are working through a language barrier.

Below, I seek to elaborate and demonstrate the impact of cultural differences on the ways in which we listen and understand one another through stories of TIUA students’ experiences on the Willamette campus, hoping that spending some time with TIUA students through this essay will lead more people to take a few more steps toward engaging not only TIUA students but also other members of campus about whom they may have hesitated in the past because of fear of or discomfort with difference.

Despite the complications that arise from our partnership, the partnership between TIUA and Willamette brings with it many unique learning experiences for our combined community.3 Our universities don’t even work on the same yearly schedule, yet we share many of the same goals, resources, and expectations of our students. Our courses, housing, activities, and student services overlap, and the areas where we can learn and grow from our exchange overlap in all these areas and more. These are areas in which we as partner universities have opportunities to work together in learning about how diversity impacts the ways we can make our programs more meaningful and our students more successful at reaching their goals.

Diversity Among TIUA Students

One of the most helpful things we can do for a minority group in our community is to learn more about who they are and never assume that similarity in one category means similarity in every other. Atsuko Kezuka, a 2007 TIUA student, says it best: “I don’t have same character with other [TIUA students]. Even [if ] they are my best friends. Because if we have same character, it’s very boring!” As we get to know the culture(s) of the TIUA students, we will also find ourselves acknowledging the individuality of each TIUA student within the context of that culture and changing the way we listen in order to give TIUA students and other minority group members the respect they need to express themselves with confidence.

TIUA students are as diverse as Willamette students. Most students are Japanese, but there are also sometimes students of second or third generation Chinese or Korean ancestry, who were born and raised in Japan but still have a strong connection with their ethnic background. There are also sometimes students of mixed backgrounds, such as of Portuguese-Japanese ancestry. Sometimes, students from other Asian countries go to Tokyo International University in Japan (TIU) as exchange students, then become exchange students in America through TIU, in effect studying American culture while simultaneously learning about Japanese culture through their classmates. Regional differences within Japan are also evident in each TIUA class: despite Japan’s relatively small size, students come with diverse dialects and traditions depending on the part of Japan from which they come. A student from Hokkaido will have a different background from students in the Tokyo area, as would a student from Okinawa. Economically speaking, some students work to save money for their study abroad experience, others go into debt or rely heavily on scholarships to come to America, and others rely entirely on their parents for support. Differences in age are more distinct for TIUA students than they would be for American students because of the Japanese cultural expectation that an older individual has different formal responsibilities from a younger one (the sempai/kohai relationship). Sexual orientation is not a comfortable topic to discuss in public in Japan—students are often amazed by the relative openness of conversation on this topic in America—so it is rare and still socially threatening for TIUA students to “come out” or otherwise discuss their sexuality publicly. As a result, this area of diversity is not easy to identify or discuss, though it is statistically likely that some TIUA students privately identify with an orientation other than heterosexual. In any case, while the most immediate impression of TIUA students’ sleepy but excited faces upon arrival may give an impression of sameness, diversity is as much a part of the TIUA context as of any other.

The social groups navigated by TIUA students at any given moment are twofold: those of American culture as well as those differing by age, class, race, and ethnicity within the TIUA group itself. Any member of this dual community may find that he is in the dominant group in some contexts and the minority group in other contexts. Thus, a TIUA student of Japanese ancestry and from a middle-class family in Japan will find himself in the majority while among TIUA students, though he becomes a minority when with American students. A Chinese student who is doing a double exchange as a student of a Japanese university in an American exchange program, in contrast, is a minority in both contexts. Neither context may be entirely comfortable, particularly because Japanese society has a different approach to diversity than American society, meaning that a minority student in both groups has to follow different expectations in each case. It is not an option for a minority student among TIUA students to simply step away from Japanese culture while in the program. Most of this student’s classes will be with Japanese students, especially for his first five months in the program, and most of his gains in American cultural awareness will pass through the lens of Japanese culture, too, depending on how often TIUA courses reference Japanese culture as a basis for comparison and how far the student has assimilated into Japanese culture, particularly if he or she grew up in Japan.

Japanese culture manages diversity very differently from American culture. Japanese culture requires that difference be minimized or ignored as a way to highlight group solidarity and harmony. As the saying goes, “The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.” No one member of the group should be singled out, by Japanese standards, because singling someone out creates separation between that person and the group. Americans may have a negative reaction toward this concept and worry about loss of individual identity, but in Japanese culture this is viewed in a positive way, as a form of strengthening group bonds. These different expectations can lead to complex situations for a student who is a minority in both groups. For example, a Korean-Japanese student who is eating dinner with a mixed group of Japanese and American friends will find that her ethnicity is referenced frequently by the Americans, who may expect her to use her ethnicity as a frame of reference for other things, while it is downplayed by the Japanese students in order to make the student feel like an equal member of the group. How should this student proceed? She needs to tread a fine line between responding to the American students—whose opinion of her will be influenced by how eloquently and honestly she can speak from her experience—and responding to the Japanese students—whose opinion of her will be influenced by how well she reinforces her membership with the group. Even as the student is seeking to integrate into American culture, her reputation and relative comfort among her Japanese classmates would be affected by ignoring their cultural expectations. In some cases, the cultural expectations she faces are mutually exclusive and she will have to determine which aspects of her relationship with her community are important for her to maintain, and which she feels safe leaving behind.

This complexity of the relationships among TIUA students and differences in their experiences of their time at Willamette University are important to notice, because TIUA students, like many Willamette students of minority status, are frequently seen as a single group with homogeneous characteristics, when in fact they are, as individuals, completely different from each other, just as any student described by a blanket term such as “Hispanic,” “lesbian,” or “non-traditional” is completely different from other people who are identified in the same way, even as they may share similar issues. Keeping this in mind as we consider how we listen to members of our community will help us respond to each person more sensitively.

A Japanese Cultural Understanding of Listening

I have observed that in the first few moments of most interactions with TIUA students we inevitably come to a standstill in which we face a choice between ending the conversation or encouraging it to continue in some way, though we’re not sure how. The student has a look on her face that says she wants the conversation to go on but doesn’t know how to proceed herself, and I can either smilingly go on to something else or settle down for a longer talk. When I first worked with TIUA students, I responded to these moments by hopping from topic to topic restlessly, wondering if the student would ever engage me as I moved from asking about the student’s major, to hometown, to hobbies, to dreams, and getting responses of only a few words to most of these. “So…what do you care about?” I found myself wanting to ask, in moments of frustration. I didn’t realize that we were operating under different expectations of how the conversation could and should occur.

The differences between Japanese and American conversations are based in differences in our understanding of relationships. American culture is individualized and task-oriented, so relationship building often comes as a result of working with others to accomplish a task. Thus, an American may begin a conversation with sharing information about herself, giving it to the other person like a gift and then expecting to get information from the other person in return to show that a certain level of trust has been established. This trust will stretch as deeply as required for whatever the task at hand is— whether a simple dinner conversation or a group project—and could evolve into a deep friendship over time.

Japanese culture is group-oriented, so a task doesn’t get accomplished until relationships within a group are already somewhat established. Because of this approach, a Japanese person may begin a conversation with a formal introduction and spend time finding out as indirectly as possible what the exact relationship is between himself and his companion(s), to be sure that whatever he says or does does not create conflict or discomfort. The relationship is initially more important than the task at hand, so the Japanese person would rather leave a task undone if it involves conflict or disagreement that could injure the relationship, especially if the relationship is new.

I have noted again and again how delicate the communication process can be. When an American expects to work from within her own feelings toward those of the other person, she frequently mistrusts the Japanese tendency to start by figuring out the other person’s thoughts while downplaying one’s own. When a Japanese person interacts with an American, he often becomes frustrated with the seeming selfishness of the American’s insistence on distinguishing herself from other people and failure to remember people who don’t do the same in return. “She [a TIUA alumna] told me before I came here that I would have to be independent from other TIUA students if I want anyone to recognize me,” Shosuke Inoue, a 2007 TIUA student, said. These differences can lead to misunderstandings, so it is beneficial for our community to be aware of them.

In Japanese culture, the listener works like a detective, interpreting the speaker’s meaning based on highly contextual language; that is, most of a person’s meaning is not in what he says but in how he says it. The ideal communicator in Japan would be a person who, after hearing only a few words from another person, is able to accomplish a great deal. If, for example, she notices her friend rubbing his arms a little while sitting in her living room, she may herself comment, “Oh, it’s getting a little cold in here,” and close the window. Her friend should not need to ask for this favor directly. As much as possible in a conversation, requests, conflicts, and questions remain under the surface, while clues to their existence float through the conversation through non-verbal cues, indirect references, and comments made through mutual friends. The listener sorts through these various clues without asking direct questions, because asking direct questions such as, “Do you want me to close the window?” as in the above example, could embarrass the speaker by implying that the speaker didn’t say or do enough to make himself understood.

Silence is valued in Japanese culture in a way that is different from American culture. As the Japanese sayings go, “Silence is golden,” and “Silence surpasses speech.” Silence in a conversation becomes a productive moment to consider what might be going on under the surface of the conversation, giving each person a chance to renegotiate the situation if he or she senses consensus has not yet been reached about an issue. In contrast, American culture prioritizes the speaker’s responsibility to convey meaning as clearly and concisely as possible, and welcomes active questioning by the listener as a way to challenge the speaker to clarify still further. While in the West we do care about silence and value it, it is often spoken of in the context of speech, such as using a pause to accentuate what was said. In any other moment, the silence would be awkward, sending a message that the conversation is boring or uncomfortable, or that the conversation is coming to an end. Americans often value lively conversations in which there is a quick back-and-forth of speaking, and thinking as we speak instead of before we speak and interrupting someone to disagree or make a point are all acceptable actions.

The indirectness described in the example above is not the same as being shy, though TIUA students will often say, “I am shy,” in order to express that they are not as direct or “blunt” as American students. One common example of indirectness is the following: A students comes to me and says, “Cassandra, you look so busy. You must have so much to do.” Taken in an American sense, her comments would simply sound like an acknowledgement of my current condition, and I might follow the comment by inquiring about how she has been doing lately, too, saying, “Yes, I’ve been really busy. How have you been?” However, taken in a Japanese sense, her comments about my busy schedule are her way of saying that she doesn’t want to interrupt my work but needs to ask a favor or question of me. If I hear this comment and take it in a Japanese sense, I might respond, “I’m okay, I’m a little busy but it’s not too difficult,” telling her indirectly that she is welcome to ask me a question or request my help with homework, a cultural question, or something else. Even the most outgoing and talkative TIUA students sometimes use this technique to ask for help, so how would one know the difference between a student using American-style communication and Japanese-style communication? Sometimes cultural differences cannot be discovered based only on the surface level of an interaction. However, we can situate ourselves in a conversation by continually asking, “What don’t I know about this person and his interests, responsibilities, and needs? Is there anything about this conversation that I’m confused about or that is making me unsure of how to proceed? Is there a piece to this conversation that I’m missing?” Such ongoing attention to the conversation can help us figure out how our communication styles are different and lead to a deeper understanding of one another.

What TIUA Students Would Like to See in Our Community

What many TIUA students long for during their 10-month sojourn in America is a deeper connection with their Willamette friends, classmates, and teachers. This goes beyond welcoming them. While most TIUA students express awe at the number of smiles and greetings they receive from Willamette students and staff—it is one of their first and long-lasting impressions of Americans—such greetings are not the same as an authentic connection between two human beings that develops into an equal relationship. TIUA students want to get beyond superficiality and be known as individuals, not as “my TIUA student friend,” a comment often accompanied by forgetting the TIUA student’s name or other simple identifying markers such as what his or her major is. In a conversation with me about this issue, Yuki Sugisawa, a 2005 TIUA student and now a WU student graduating in 2009, said,

During my year at Willamette I often felt more like a customer than a friend [because of the general friendliness of everyone toward me, even strangers]. One case, though, was different. My roommate didn’t have any background with Japanese people and didn’t really come with a lot of stereotypes, and he told me that because of me his thinking changed about Japanese people. In that case, I felt that he was truly my friend.

In contrast, when one person or a group of people invests time in getting to know a TIUA student, that investment reassures the student that his or her difference does not undermine his or her importance:

My roommate always invited [me] to dinner with her friends. They love to tell some jokes any time…but sometimes I couldn’t get it because the conversation was really speedy to me. However, my roommate noticed about me every time, and ask to me like “Did you get it?” with big and good laugh. She told it to me again with another words. She seemed not [to] mind about that. When I talked to them, they also listen to me carefully even if my speaking speed was too slowly. That deed absolutely helped me to make some friends and talk to them with English (Haruka Ushida, 2004 TIUA student).

Haruka’s roommate and friends respected Haruka’s presence and expected that she had something important to add to their interactions. They began with the assumption that what she had to say was important.

Because speaking English as a second language may sometimes give the illusion of simplicity, it is easy for us to assume that TIUA students don’t struggle with complex relationships, moral issues, or sense of identity. However, the truth is that TIUA students do deal with these issues, often to a more intense degree than usual through the lens of their lives abroad. Mile Hong, a 2005 TIUA student of North and South Korean background who was one of a group of 12 students with whom I worked closely as an International Peer Coach, had always thought a lot about her identity because she grew up in Japan and was culturally, if not ethnically, Japanese. Her arrival in America coincided with an increase in tension in the political relationship between America and North Korea, so coming to America and sometimes dealing with the implications of her background only intensified these reflections for her:

Mentally, my nationality was the biggest challenge [during my time in America]. When [the] FBI came to see me, I thought, ‘If I’m arrested because of this, what should I do? My time at TIUA would be over after just a little while! I came here just like other TIUA students to study, so why is this happening to me? Oh my goshÉthis is the end [of my time here].

Even though Mile grew up in Japan and is completely bicultural, her nationality led her to face unique challenges during her time here, sometimes even requiring TIUA staff to stand up for her right to be here. She felt that she was here on the same terms as other TIUA students—to study English and American culture—but she was treated, in some cases, as though she might have ulterior motives in being here because of her background.

Fortunately, most students at TIUA never face such extreme situations, but it is likely that many of the situations in which they do find themselves will fall outside the normal level of challenges that they would expect to encounter in their home environment. Because of this, they and any staff or friends who work through it with them will have to negotiate unfamiliar territory. That unfamiliar territory is where the need for humility and openness to what we don’t know, interest in learning more about the values and beliefs of the other person, and concern for what is under the surface in a conversation is most important. Mile is an example of a student who needed friends, staff, and faculty to be advocates for her in numerous ways. Even while we helped her, she was an inspiring force for us, because she faced every situation with creativity and developed a strong sense of self as a result:

I grew up in Japan and speak in Japanese the same as TIUA students. But I am Korean. WU students asked me what is difference between Japanese and Korean? It was hard to explain because I looked Japanese or they don’t care how I look. But I felt ashamed that I couldn’t answer the question clearly. Then I started to think, ‘Who I am? I can do what everyone (other TIUA students) can do. There is no difference.’ But I found the answer! I have my background a little bit more than other TIUA friends and…I think [this difference] was important for me. I could encourage myself if something happened (Mile Hong, TIUA 2005 student).

What Mile needed more than anything from me was for me, as her first American friend and guide, to be an open listener. Even though I could not understand her unique situation through my own experiences, we were able to build a close friendship through working out how her background influenced her values and views of life at Willamette, and how her experience at Willamette was connected to my own. Investing my time and energy into my friendship with Mile gave me the opportunity to learn from her, too. From Mile I learned about the complexities as well as the differences in perspective that come from belonging to more than one nationality, something I never could have imagined on my own, and made me more aware of many other members of our community who are in the same situation.

When we have a conversation with someone, whether it be Mile in her unique situation or a student who seems to fit every stereotype we have about a particular minority group, we need to respond to what they are saying, and we need to do so as appropriately as we are able. This can be difficult to do when what we hear threatens our sense of identity. In Difficult Conversations, authors Stone, Patton, and Heen explain:

Our anxiety [about difficult conversations] results not just from having to face the other person, but from having to face ourselves. The conversation has the potential to disrupt our sense of who we are in the world, or to highlight what we hope we are but fear we are not. The conversation poses a threat to our identity—the story we tell ourselves about ourselves—and having our identity threatened can be profoundly disturbing (Stone, Patton, and Heen 2000, 111-12).

It is intimidating to think that we might be mistaken about some aspect of our identities. If, for example, I believe, “Even though I’m white, I don’t discriminate,” but then someone gives me an example of discrimination that I have actually done before, my first response is to defend myself. I shut down so I can’t hear anymore and say, “No, no, that can’t be true. I didn’t mean to discriminate, so I wasn’t doing anything wrong.” I might try to leave the conversation as quickly as possible. A Japanese friend once told me, “You (White) Americans think that wherever you go is America.” Upon hearing this, I had to resist the urge to defend myself from what I felt was an unfair accusation, and I had to ask myself to reflect on the times I have assumed privilege as a right of my ethnicity and have benefited from that privilege—in this case, the right to assume that people will adjust to me instead of the reverse—and I can have a learning conversation about it. On every occasion, we have a choice to learn more about ourselves through engaging in a conversation about difference, or we can avoid it and try to escape.

Many TIUA students have great ideas about ways to enrich our campus, which they work toward accomplishing by connecting with Willamette students or putting together events themselves. This year, 79 out of 89 TIUA students took advantage of more than 245 leadership opportunities and volunteered for over 6,000 hours as a group. Many of those opportunities came out of the students’ desire to connect with Americans and to understand the culture here, by working with Willamette students, local school children, the families of migrant farm workers, and many other members of our community. Most TIUA students try their best to reach out to the Willamette community and seek friendships, understanding, and connections across the cultural differences. I, and all the staff at TIUA, greatly appreciate the people—students, staff, and faculty—who reach out to our students and help them create their own experience during their year in America. Our goal is to help our students reach whatever they hope for while they are here; as Nao Kawakami put it, “TIUA doesn’t make you strong, but just help you to be strong. You can build your own style by yourself.” I have known some students who by even coming to America have already accomplished their goals, some students whose only goal was to make at least one close American friend or to be able to hold a simple conversation in English without being afraid, and others who feel that ten months is just the beginning of a goal to work in the United Nations, cure the world of cancer, or find world peace, among other things. Every year is different, because every TIUA student comes to the program with different expectations, hopes, and desires for his or her experience. If that sounds familiar, it should. Willamette students come to their university experience with similar needs and hopes, and, like TIUA students, are unique and contribute to our community in their own ways.

“Freedom of Expression” Should Not Exclude the Responsibility and Role of the Listener

I do not have the space or scope to talk about the various important skills of cross-cultural communication that can contribute to a better understanding of difference, nor do I wish to say we should change our listening style to become more Japanese somehow so that we can understand this single minority group on our campus better.4 I want to emphasize that, whether we find ourselves situated in the majority, minority, or both in our community, we can all benefit from a commitment to authentically listening to others and responding to them, whether we like their methods and ideas or not,5 and whether we know their background already or not. In the words of Paolo Freire, “it is in listening to the student that I learn how to speak with him or her.” Looking at the world from different perspectives is how all of us—students, staff, faculty, and all the other members of our community— begin to build trust and respect across our differences and work toward creating a stronger, healthier community.

My hope is that, in sharing more about the culture and stories of TIUA students in our community, I have demonstrated how learning to listen differently can open up our relationships with people who we might otherwise think live in a separate ‘world’ and discover that we all navigate the same world with equal complexity and passion for our dreams. TIUA students are some of the bravest, most creative, most compassionate, and most motivated students I know. They feel deeply, speak honestly about their experiences, and struggle to understand difference to the best of their abilities, and do all of this while trying work out the values and expectations of a culture that is very different from their own. I am humbled and awed by the paths that led them to Willamette University and where those paths lead them next. For every student, this path is unique and inspiring, and I hope that everyone in this community has the opportunity to hear some of their stories during our and their time here.

This wish is, as I said above, not unlike what we say about Willamette students, and, if we stretch ourselves far enough to truly believe it, what we can say about the members of any community. As long as we find ourselves situated in diverse communities in which difference is easy to find even when we would rather avoid it because of the way it tends to slow down and complicate “simple” tasks, we will be tempted to let the speaker handle the tough topics and hold back what we owe to a conversation as listeners. Listening does not take responsibility away from the speaker, who has the obligation to express herself or himself as well as possible. However, more than any other place, an institution of education ought to be the location for its community to question its own structure and look for the areas where it needs to become more equalizing and empowering for all its members. Let us take time in our community to decide what we can expect from one another, especially about how we plan to listen, because listening is the main avenue to grasping the perspective and humanity of another person, even a person we don’t necessarily like or admire, and community members who have faced discrimination, oppression, or ignorance from us in the past need to know that we are at least practicing how to hear them better now. As a community, we owe each other this minimum expectation of respect: that if I ask someone to listen to me, they will.

[1] — Any students who are named or whose personal information is shared in this essay have given permission to the author to do so. Interviews with TIUA students for this publication occurred from May 2007-July 2007. Most interviews were conducted in writing and students sent me their responses via email, except for Yuki Sugisawa and Shosuke Inoue, with whom I talked in person during the same time period.

[2] — I am indebted to Jeani Bragg and Naomi Collette for our numerous conversations about communication, problem solving, and relationship building across cultural differences, the fruits of which appear throughout this essay in ways big and small. Had it not been for their patience with me first as a student, then as a staff-member, I might still be talking past TIUA students instead of engaging in conversations with them.

[3] — “In 1965, Japanese educator Taizo Kaneko wrote to 50 colleges and universities throughout the United States, offering to send the eager young minds of his culture to live and learn with American students. Of the 35 responses he received, only one reply - from Willamette University’s President G. Herbert Smith - constituted an unconditional and immediate acceptance of his offer. Out of the shared vision of these two men, a mutually enriching relationship was bornÉTIUA stands as a solid example of Dr. Kaneko’s commitment to students who are unafraid to think, to question, or to see the world around them.” ( http://www.tiua.edu/about/history.shtml)

[4] — Many people express concern about having to “act Japanese” in order to talk with TIUA students and have successful relationships with them. However, TIUA students commit a lot of energy and effort in learning about American-style communication, and practice using it during their time here, so adjusting our community structure or individual personalities to be more Japanese isn’t necessary. Rather, greater awareness of Japanese culture helps us in the sense of making us more aware of potential areas of misunderstanding so we can work through them more effectively.

[5] — During author Sir Salman Rushdie’s recent visit to the Willamette University campus, he spoke to this need, saying, “Be brutal with ideas but courteous to those who spoke them.”

References

Adler, Mortimer J. 1983. How to Speak; How to Listen. New York: MacMillan.
Bennett, Milton J. 1993. Towards ethnorelativism: a developmental model of intercultural sensitivity. In Education for the Intercultural Experience, edited by R. Michael Paige. Maine: Intercultural Press.
Bennett, Milton J. and M. Hammer. The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity. Intercultural Communication Institute. 1998. http://www.intercultural.org/pdf/ dmis.pdf (accessed October 21, 2007).
Freire, Paolo. 1970. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Translated by M. B. Ramos. New York: Seabury Press, Continuum.
Howard, G. 1996. Whites in multicultural education: rethinking our role. In Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action. Teachers’ College, Columbia University, New York.
Kingston-Mann, E., and T. Sieber. 2001. Introduction. In Achieving Against the Odds: How Academics Become Teachers of Diverse Students. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Sleeter, Christine E. 1995. Reflections on my use of multicultural and critical pedagogy when students are white. In Multicultural Education, Critical Pedagogy, and the Politics of Difference, edited by Christine E. Sleeter and Peter McLaren. New York: State University of New York Press.
Stone, D., B. Patton, and S. Heen. 2000. Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most. New York: Penguin Books.