SEMANTIC PLAY AND POSSIBILITY Invited Contribution Playing with Our Understandings

The world becomes our representation as we solemnly become the singular representatives of all things. We become, here, the grand colonizers. We become the ones that savage those whom we consider unorganized, uncivilized, illogical, immoral, immature, by rendering them in our own image. We don’t allow them a face (difference, here, must be fixed, for to be different is to fail to be at the center); we give them a façade of our own making. Deep in our Western heritage, and threading lines into contemporary educational theory and practice, there is a pleasant, attractive name for this colonization—we wish to understand. (Jardine, 1992/2004, p. 270) David Jardine (1992/2004) questions our very sensibility about what it means to “understand. ” In the act of understanding, which he claims is a colonizing act, we as educators seek to shape others into our own rendering. When we believe we “understand ” something, we are acting upon someone or some-thing else, bringing them into our internal representation of what we hav