Suspending or being willing to constantly revise one own's beliefs?

Hi all!
I've very much enjoyed this week’s readings and in general all I've been learning lately in the area of literacy-based language education. The review of communicative competence as having been somehow, at some point, wrongly separated from reflective and interpretive practice (Kern, 2000, Thorne's chap 1. in the edited volume by Belz and Thorne) is very enlightening to me. (If you have a chance I recommend reading Kern's intro to this argument with a two-page comparison of two French as a FL classes on the same topic. To me it explained many of my frustrations as a FL learner). Of course, as experience with the Cultura project shows, the focus on "culture, identity, behavior and meaning" (Belz and Thorne, x), and particularly on the awareness and analysis of our own complex selves through interaction with others and understanding is easier preached than actually done successfully. It requires from language instructors, among other things, immense flexibility and self-awareness of our own "complex selves", getting rid of our prescriptive tendencies as to the proper codes of communicative interaction, as well as trust in students' disposition to actually communicate and put themselves in their interlocutors' shoes, provided they are adequately motivated and guided to do so.

One aspect that has been worrying me some in the discussion of the goal of intercultural competence (IC) is the potential interpretation of Byram (97:34)'s definition (readiness to suspend disbelief and judgment in others' meanings, beliefs and behaviors, as well as belief in one own' s in order to be able to see them from the viewpoint of others) as the need to eliminate judgment, opinion altogether. For some reason to me it seems important to make a difference between the undesirable practice of drawing definitive, stereotyping conclusions based on single comments and the fundamentally important practice of our interpretive expertise as IC or multicompetent speakers. In order to revise and question our judgments we need to be aware that we have had them and not “demonize” the fact that we have them. What should be promoted is their desirable and necessary “transient” nature. I hope that the authors of the Cultura article are aware that De Beauvoir (whose quote stress the importance of not “jumping to conclusions”) are aware that she was herself extremely “opinionated” to say the least! Again, my point is that if we believe that one of the paths towards greater IC is to develop our reflexive and interpretive abilities along with communication, we should guard ourselves from the “colorblinding” effect of excessive “suspension” of opinion or judgment. It is fine (and unavoidable) to react and take a stand on what we become expose to, the important thing is to be ready to review it in light of the next input, as much in terms of how my opinion or judgment has changed as in terms of what the process has changed me. 

It is highly likely that for most IC scholars "suspending (dis)beliefs" never meant "demonizing" interpretation, judgment or opinions on what we are confronted with. But somehow the pervasive idea that the need to be open to 'other ways' and negative effect of stereotyping and profiling somehow require a sort of "tabula rasa" (or 'blank slate', is that the English equivalent?) attitude, made me feel it is worth bring up this point for discussion. What do you think?