Reflective Discourses in the Classroom:
Creating Spaces Where Students Can Change Their Minds

by Sally Chandler

We are discussing Tobias Wolff's story "Say Yes" in a writing class at Wayne State University, an urban, commuter school in Detroit. In this story a white wife and her husband confront their assumptions about identity, race, and love. The story's revelation–or lack of one–grows out of a conversation in which the wife asks her husband if he would have married her "if I'd been black." There are twenty students in this class and no racial or ethnic group represents more than a quarter of this number. What is more, most identities are hybrid, such that only the Arab-Irish-American twins share a racial/ethnic background. Although we have spent almost ten weeks talking about similarities and differences in who we are, this story about love and identity raises highly charged material for all of us, and the need to represent deeply held personal feelings to individuals different from ourselves complicates both our feelings and our representations.