For our last community partner meeting, Abby, Antonio, and I decided to keep it simple and meet at his office in the College of the Environment house. We weren’t very inspired to plan an activity or choose a new location, I think, in reality, we just wanted to keep talking and get to know him better.
As our meetings went on, we always learned something interesting about Antonio, whether it was about his work, his life, or the experience of a different generation, which I particularly found exciting. Although we often focused on our different cultural identities, I especially appreciated noticing the generational gap in how we interacted and processed questions and information. Antonio often surprised me with perspectives I sometimes did not fully grasp, but that felt wiser and more mature. I noticed myself trying to think about situations from a different point of view, and I liked taking on Antonio’s worldview. He is one of the people I know who may be most different from me in almost every way, from gender to culture to age. This questioning of positionality and perspective is something we learned in class, but these meetings helped me understand more concretely what another worldview can look like.
As a result, the biggest lesson I believe I gained from this experience is how to put things into perspective. At times, it felt difficult to connect with Antonio because of the clear presence of difference, but I tried, and continue to try, to use that difference as a tool for self-reflection. I think back to the Intercultural Praxis Model of Kathryn Sorrells, which includes dialogue, inquiry, and positioning as three of its components. These three pillars accurately summarize my experience with these meetings, as there was a clear “relationship of tension that is oppositional and transformative.” I believe I was able to “stretch across difference” to challenge my worldview and the way I make sense of and act in the world (p. 19, Opening the Conversation, Studying Intercultural Communication). I now better understand how these meetings fit into our learning outcomes and why they are important to our class.
I am grateful for our time with Antonio and hope to see him around campus.
