The Exchanges with Janet L. Miller

Abstract

While the range of topics was wide, Janet Miller’s questioning positioned clarification at the center of the dialogical encounter. Not assuming that she understood familiar concepts now that they had been recontextualized in China, Miller requested clarification. Concepts are not free-floating universals but situated and specific, and Miller acknowledged this fact by regularly indicating the context of her questions: the United States. That ongoing process of contextualization—of self-situating¹—is crucial in clarification. By situating concepts in one’s own context, one is not necessarily retreating to the familiar. Indeed, in Miller’s case referencing the usage of concepts in the United States was less about the United States than it was about clarifying the connotations of concepts embedded in her requests for understanding. By such specification, Miller enabled participants to focus their answers as they might not have been, had they been responding to the same questions in China, say with their own students in curriculum studies. In these careful, sometimes cautious, always illuminating exchanges, we witness the intellectual labor of “internationalization.” It starts with clarification.