Farhat Shahzad’s research paper “The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning” opened my eyes to the idea that even if people have been taught something the same manner, they may interpret it completely different.  I had never really considered that where you grew up, what culture you grew up around, all those little things, had such an impact on the perspective that you would take.  In her paper, Shahzad states that “a human agent gives meanings to facts in the light of how these communities represent them, the words they use, the stories they tell, the images they produce, the emotions they associate with them, and they way they classify and conceptualize them” (pg.306).  Only after having read this did it occur to me that the reason I have the same, for example, political views, as my parents do it is because I grew up with their influence.  It was in the TV shows we watched and the world issues that we talked about, that their opinion slowly became mine.  This is not because it was forced upon me but simply that this was the voice I had listened to all my life, the voice that guided me, the voice that taught me and therefore I had never seen a reason to look elsewhere.  That is until now.  Shahzad’s paper has encouraged me to reconsider many of the opinions I previously thought to have been my own.   I now understand that it has not just been my parents but also my friends, teachers, and the country in which I grew up in, among many other “interpretative communities” that have shaped my perspective of different topics.  I experienced this first hand when I was talking to my new roommate, who happened to be from the United States.  The topic of history had somehow come up and immediately she disagrees with the Canadian version of history.  Since she had grown up in America, the communities that had shaped her remembering and learning were very different from ours.  Her understanding of history, the way that she remembers it, would have been the understanding in more than one of her communities.  Shahzad writes that “students learn not only in a school system, but also within a highly diverse network of communities” (pg.310).  This conversation I had with my roommate, only further proved Shahzad’s idea of how interpretative communities frame the way we remember and learn.