Peripheral Visions

past, the flashes of insight that come from going over old memories, especially of events that were ambiguous, mysterious, incomplete. In the past, when memorization was a common form of learning, children committed long passages of poetry and scripture to memory without understanding them. Then, if the texts were well chosen, they had a lifetime in which to spiral back, exploring new layers of meaning. What was once barely intelligible may be deeply meaningful a second time. And a third.
    Spiral learning moves through complexity with partial understanding, allowing for later returns. For some people, what is ambiguous and not immediately applicable is discarded, while for others, much that is unclear is vaguely retained, taken in with peripheral vision for possible later clarification, hard to correct unless it is made explicit. Beyond the denotations lie unexplored connotations and analogies.
    What we call the familiar is built up in layers to a structure known so deeply that it is taken for granted and virtually impossible to observe without the help of contrast. Encountering familiar issues in a strange setting is like returning on a second circuit of a Möbius strip and coming to the experience from the opposite side. Seen from a contrasting point of view or seen suddenly through the eyes of an outsider, one’s own familiar patterns can become accessible to choice and criticism. With yet another return, what seemed radically different is revealed as part of a common space.
    If I want my students to be able to observe their own culture, I offer them alternative versions of the same sequence, sufficiently unfamiliar to focus their attention. One of the best ways of doing this is by looking at familiar patterns of growth framed in other cultures, so I may ask them to read life histories like the life of the Winnebago Indian Crashing Thunder, or the life of the San woman Nisa, or to interview acquaintances with different backgrounds. In Iran, I carried this approach a step further by bringing, on separate occasions, American and Iranian mother-infant pairs into the classroom. Part of my purpose was to show that very small infants learn some of their assumptions about the world even before learning to speak. Many of those assumptions are then never put into words but are retained at such a deep level of learning that they seem self-evident. My other purpose was to persuade my students of the legitimacy of learning from observation.
    I brought an American pair first, so the students’ eyes would be opened by strangeness, and then an Iranian pair. The mothers were both well-educated, affluent homemakers with first children, daughters of about ten months, able to get around the room but not yet walking or speaking. I had told each mother that the students would be observing her infant and had asked her to bring whatever she would need to keep her daughter content for the two-hour class period. I set a chair and a light cotton rug ( zilu ) on the floor at the front of the room.
    The American mother, we’ll call her Joan, sat on the chair and set her baby, Becky, on the floor beside her, on the rug. Becky was immediately fascinated by the watching students, as they were fascinated by her bright-eyed responsiveness. She wriggled on her belly to one after another, responding and crowing as they dangled pencils and keys and offered her candy, climbing up their legs and flirting. From time to time she looked back at her mother, who nodded and encouraged her explorations. The floor was filthy, and Becky’s hands were quickly blackened, her jumpsuit and face smeared. After a while, her mother fetched her, scrubbed a bit at her face and hands with a paper towel she moistened from a thermos, and offered her some toys—a set of colored cups that fit one into the other, a puzzle, and a hard-paged book. “Apple,” she said, pointing it out to Becky. “See, the apple is red. Button,” on the next page. “A blue button.” Becky played for a while with the toys, then ventured out again to make friends with the students.
    When the class came to discuss their session with Becky and Joan, they were unanimous in their delight with Becky and their criticism of Joan. She had failed, they said, in her responsibility of keeping Becky clean; Becky could have picked up all sorts of germs from the classroom floor. One of the topics that had come up repeatedly when I interviewed foreign women married into Iranian families was the