Creating Cosmopolitan Meaning Through Conversation

• In Event: Cosmopolitanism and Cultural Creativity

Abstract

I will examine conditions of communication in everyday school life from a cosmopolitan perspective. I draw upon Appiah’s analysis of “partial cosmopolitanism” (2007, p. xvii). According to Appiah, human beings walk a moral line between the universal and the particular. There are universal moral values having to do with respect, fairness, and truth; there are local moral values having to do with concrete practices, norms, and expectations. Thus Appiah refers to a “partial” or rooted cosmopolitanism. I also draw upon Hansen’s notion of cosmopolitanism “on the ground” (2010). In this outlook cosmopolitanism constitutes an embodied way of being in the world. It becomes a useful construct for framing the creative capacities people have for not just tolerating but learning from cultural and individual difference.

According to Appiah (2007), people coordinate their lives across personal and cultural difference through a language of values. Davidson (1991/2001) has argued that such language is public in the sense that people exchange reactions to objects, thoughts, events, and speech within a shared world. What makes cosmopolitanism possible is the human capacity to understand others’ perspectives through listening to stories – thereby recognizing that people share a single world even if they inhabit it differently.

My approach will be philosophical, though I will concretize the argument through everyday story. For example, a student teacher where I work in Sweden, who had grown up in the Middle East, told me the following episode from her trainee job. She, her pre-school teacher mentor, and a group of children went to the woods, looking for signs of spring (nature has a very strong position in the Swedish pre-school curriculum). Among the children there was a girl from Somalia. She had recently arrived to the country so there was also an interpreter with her. The group found some blue anemones. Everyone looked at the flowers that came so early in the spring; then the teacher turned to the interpreter and asked: “how do you say ‘blue anemone’ in Somali?”

The Swedish student teacher, with her transcultural background, sighed over the teacher’s presupposing that these flowers grow everywhere. At first sight it is easy to agree with her about the teacher’s narrowness. However, if we look at the scene again there is more to discern. Firstly, this event is a typical contemporary example of a local curricular activity with many transcultural connections (Rizvi, 2009). Secondly, the teacher communicated with the Somali girl through a language of values. “Look here,” she evoked; “the long winter is over!” She used shared objects, and the language of values, to communicate something noteworthy. What she overlooked was that they did not automatically share the same vocabulary of values. The flower perhaps had little meaning for the girl – up to now. Yet a conversation on values had begun, crossing cultural backgrounds and experiences, and drawing teacher and student alike into a potentially creative cultural and educational space. I will suggest that these “ordinary” conversations in education can have significant cumulative effects in building cosmopolitan-minded human relation.

Author

• Ninni Wahlstrom, Orebro University