Negotiating the Meaning of Difference

Abstract

The move from theorizing difference to dealing with difference in an intercultural collaboration creates generative conflicts for educators and students. This article tracks the conflicting discourses, alternative representations, and political consequences the construct “Black English” had for Black and White mentors, teenage writers, and instructors in a Community Literacy Center collaboration. Comparing the accounts offered by resistance, conversation, and negotiation theory, it examines the dilemmadriven process of constructing a new negotiated meaning in the face of conflicting forces, voices, and representations. Dealing with difference in such collaboration means not only interpreting diverse verbal and nonverbal signifying systems based on values, experience, and competing discourses but constructing a new negotiated representation in the face of conflict that offers an (at least provisional) ground for action.

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