Being able to take another’s perspective is huge and something we labor over in social work and in education. This concept has repeatedly come up during our Summer Writing Institute. My demonstration was about using videos to engage reluctant writers, but it also involved demonstrating how to solve problems. When you look at problem solving, it often comes down to seeing the problem the way the other person does – walking a mile in someone’s shoes, looking at it from their standpoint. One of the basic steps in peer mediation is having each party listen without interrupting and repeating what the other has said to their satisfaction to demonstrate that they understand – not that they necessarily agree with it. Once this is accomplished, coming up with solutions is feasible. Many times, simply understanding where the person is coming from solves whatever issues there had been.
In many of this summer’s demonstrations, perspective taking was implied or directly addressed. For example, in Ryan’s demonstration, he encouraged an on-line relationship between his AVID students and college mentors in hopes that the AVID students will take their mentor’s perspective and better understand college life as well as enabling the mentor to understand life from the AVID student’s perspective. Hillary’s demonstration had us interpreting lyrics, first from our own perspective, and then with some knowledge of the writer’s perspective. For Elaine’s, we wrote rhyme and rime to interpret everyday objects which resulted in a variety of perspectives. Ellen helped us look at hip-hop culture from an educational perspective that led us to a better understanding of the cultural, historical and sociopolitical underpinnings of hip hop and potential incorporation in the classroom. Christine had us interpreting poems in order to read these reflective of the author’s perspective. After analyzing two characters from different time periods, Pat had us use a cultural-response approach to take the perspective of these characters and create a conversation between them keeping true to each character. Given a specific perspective, Morgan had us create a profile in a social network after which we discussed how this would change if the audience (perspective) changed. In small groups, we interpreted Tiffany’s picture books and had to choose from whose perspective to write and whether or not to change that perspective. Dumi had different readers read sections of a book, Voices in the Park, in order to highlight different perspectives. Her project helped us to appreciate different viewpoints and voices and to think about encouraging students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds to learn from one another. Adele had us researching objects from a museum so we could better understand whatever perspective we chose to investigate – cultural, historical, commercial, etc. And Amber had us read articles on Micheal Jackson from a variety of perspectives and then create a storyboard to portray each perspective.
Assistant Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Hunter Gehlbach, notes in his “Social Perspective Taking: A Multidimensional Approach”, “Social perspective taking can influence many elements of the academic experience… Furthermore, understanding other peoples and cultures is a fundamental component of literature, foreign languages, history, social studies and virtually all the other social science disciplines.” Gehlbach recommends that students seek out multiple viewpoints and that education encourage this.
Our world has become smaller and we have instant access to a variety of cultures with different experiences. We have to consider others’ viewpoints and figure out how to respect differing opinions, how to be open to other’s ideas, how to respectfully disagree, how to embrace novel thoughts, and how to be assertive, when needed, in a respectful manner. I believe that there is commonality – basic values of respect and responsibility – that will lead us to common ground. First we also need to know and to understand. When we begin to take another’s perspective, we begin the process of understanding. Then we can go about the business of true communication and the harder work of solving problems.
