multiculturalism/contact zones

This article by Min-Zhan Lu builds off Mary Louise Pratt's article "Arts of the Contact Zone". Both authors suggest that part of the problem with the idea of multiculturalism in writing and education is that it seems to require extra effort to incorportate it. Lu suggests that there may be ways to incorporate the ideas of multiculturalism into an English class which haven't been explored yet.
"Academic Discourse" has a set of conventions that most teachers work hard to adher to, students who struggle to follow these rules are sent to outside sources such as a writing center where instructers work with them on "mastering correct usage" of English grammar. Reading this particular passage should disturb most people in this class after we've discussed the drawbacks to teaching writing as if there was only one correct way for a person to express their ideas.
Lu discusses two examples of people who were intelligent who because of their backgrounds weren't prepared to adapt to the academic discourse in universities. Both of these cases are examples of the problems that occur when we assume that sticking to established conventions is the best way to write.
To combat this problem Lu provides students with papers where there are grammar errors which seem easy to fix. Rather than fixing them though the class is encouraged to discuss why the person might've expressed themselves in this particular manner.


Lu's students seemed to feel that traditional academic discourse was better than the less traditional writing but being exposed to both styles allowed students to have a better
understanding why they preferred one approach to the other.


I'm not sure I 100% understand the definition of contact zones. It seems that they are areas in writing where the way a person learned to use English grammar relates to how grammar is used in academic discourse. Does a contact zone have to include a difference in how grammar is interpreted?