Mary Pratt's "Arts of the Contact Zone" got me thinking as to exactly how limited my experience with this type of rhetoric I was. When her son, Sam, was learning how to say the name Carl Yastremski, I was reminded of the times I've had to call out names during attendance and butchered them. His first-grade antics were reminiscint of my limited literacy with cultures different from my own.

On page 582, Pratt defines "contact zones" as "the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict..." (582).

While I'm not sure coercion is involved to any measurable degree, I can say there is a definite degree of inequality between myself and the students I teach.

Like Guaman Poma, who used Quechua and ungrammatical Spanish in his New Chronicle, my students aren't always comfortable crossing that zone to create a message I am able to understand. In their eyes, I'm the Spanish: the one in charge of the situation.

Pratt uses a variety of examples of contact zones across literacies, but it was Robert Kaplan in his article "What in the World Is Contrastive Rhetoric?" that got me to reconsider what questions I was aking of my students and the different way they might answer them.

I might not be able to pronounce their names at the beginning, but to create a successful contact zone, the classroom must be a safe place where they can answer Kaplan's five questions.

1: What may be discussed?

2: Who has the authority to speak/write? Or: Who has the authority to write to whom under what circumstances?

3: What form(s) may the writing take?

4: What is evidence?

5: What arrangement of evidence is likely to appeal (be convincing) to the readers?

Kaplan states that for the "individual who does not participate in the monolingual, monocultural assumptions that dominate the composition classroom" these questions are terrible, because the answers might not be the right ones.

And each student must learn this for themselves, and the teacher has to be open to connecting with students for that to occur. The students will answer each question individually and each will be different than the student next to him/her. The classroom is a contact zone in a way that a tourist stop is...

After a limited time you never see these people again, but you have a drastic affect on the further actions of the people you are immersed in the contact zone with. So pay attention to each face and interaction.