Becoming like the Other

• Main Author: Wolff-michael Roth
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.113.9245; http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~julia/papers/roth05.pdf

People who spend time together begin to experience the world in similar ways, coming in fact to share the world. Just a few days ago, my wife and I walked through downtown Victoria to pick up a stereo amplifier from the repair shop when I noticed her head move slightly left to right. I turned my head in the direction of her gaze, and, before we began talking, I knew she was alerting me to the aboriginal people sitting against the wall asking for dimes, with faces ravaged by alcohol abuse. In fact, she was alerting me to the plight of the First Nations people in our country, their fight for self-government, and their battle against the alcohol. Seconds later, we talked about just that. That is, without having talked, a simple movement of her eyes while gazing in a particular direction had communicated to me what she was presently attuned to. As I thought about what had happened while walking on, I remembered many such incidences that had occurred between my younger brother and I during a period when we had spent a lot of time together. A little movement of the hand towards the forehead by of one of us allowed the other to see a person with a particular, funny haircut or hat; a slight turn of the eyes upward toward the ceiling made salient to the other of some voice that we began to overhear together. Coming to experience the world in similar ways, or rather, coming to experience a similar world is not unique to members of the same family. A decade of research showed that people who coteach come to perceive their settings in similar ways, and they tend to act like one another. Initially, our observations were incidental: while analyzing videotapes of coteaching in the early 1990s, participating teachers, researchers, and research assistants noticed that a hand