Promoting Harmony during Disagreements: A Portrait of Adult Discussions in the Indonesian Context

This paper presents different strategies applied by adult students when expressing disagreements during discussions. The use of a variety of strategies by the students show that conveying disagreements is not an easy task for the academia living in a collectivist society. Responses to the disagreements are also varied, ranging from communication deadlock to partial acceptance, support, offer of an account, support from another participant, neutralizer from another participant, and acceptance. The analysis of the data shows that, in the presence of disagreements, learning is mostly facilitated by disagreements expressed through peer acknowledgment and vulnerability assertion.