Biesta (2007) writes that to take difference seriously means that we have to give up
the idea that we can know otherness before we can adequately engage with it. We differ
in the moment where we encounter and experience difference – which more often than
not means: as it confronts us. We could, then, consider our responsibility with respect to adult education whether in the workplace or elsewhere as helping to open encounters
with difference. That is, encounters for purposes of expanding people’s experiences and
possibilities of what it means to be human. Again, this is not about simply experiencing
diversity, as though difference consists of interesting variations that need not disturb our
own world’s norms, values and interests. As Bhaba points out, diversity ‘doesn’t
generally recognise the universalist and normative stance from which it constructs its
cultural and political judgements’ (1990, p. 209). Instead, this is a responsibility to do
with expanding our own, and others, opportunities to actively meet difference. Not to
simply treat it as another worldview, a curiosity, which can be folded into one’s own
little settled ontology. But to meet difference on its own terms, as a unique and different
world to our own. When we focus on making difference, rather than similarity, we
might be better positioned to consider the bridges and juxtapositions that can be
fruitfully undertaken with collaborators enacting expertise and objects from other
worlds