#WalkMyWorld in a Graduate Multicultural Education Course:
A Personal Retrospective
Sue Ringler Pet, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY
November 25, 2014
Noted scholars purport that in order for Multicultural Education to be transformative, it
must acknowledge institutional power structures and alter school policies, practices, and programs
(Banks, 2004; Gay, 1994; Nieto & Bode, 2012). University Multicultural Education courses have
moved beyond a “cultural festivals” orientation toward deeper explorations of “ethnic identities,
cultural pluralism, unequal distribution of resources and opportunities, and other sociopolitical
problems” (Gay, 1994, p. 3). This important work can be complicated by inward personal
investigations—i.e., “facing the terror within” (Taubman, 2002, p. 99). Such introspection on
“tough topics” (such as considering one’s Whiteness or Blackness) often reveals “double binds,
contradictions, paradoxes, and defenses” (p. 101), which can infuse tension and cause student
resistance in courses in Multicultural Education (Young & Tran, 2001). It is my belief, however,
that this tension may be constructively embraced through graduate students’ exploration of their
own identities and affinities—that is, by working to notice and name one’s own sense of “self” and
“place” as a multicultural educator.
#WalkMyWorld and Multicultural Education
While teaching a graduate level Multicultural Education course at a small liberal arts
Catholic college in New York State, I invited my students to participate in the #WalkMyWorld
project. This collaborative, social media project was conceived by a group of university professors
(W. Ian O’Byrne, J. Greg McVerry, and Sue Ringler Pet) and a Hartford, CT high school English
teacher (Leanne Drapeau), after they presented a session on technology and poetry at the NCTE
conference in Boston in November, 2013. The project has since burgeoned to include opportunities
to access Blogs, photos, videos, and the written compositions of a wide geographical and age range
of participants who have joined the unique online project through the hashtag #WalkMyWorld. (See
https://sites.google.com/site/walkmyworldproject/)
Employing an additional hashtag associated with the Multicultural Education course, my
graduate students spent the first weeks of the course using multimodal construction tools (e.g.,
cell phone photos, Instagram, Vine) and the social network Twitter to capture and share aspects of
their own “worlds,” defined any way they wished. As part of the natural flow of coursework, they
analyzed and expanded their digital collections while considering and responding to the poetry of
Robert Hass, who is known for exploring the connection between the physical world and the
interior/mental world. Hass’s work was chosen for #WalkMyWorld because it can be at once
serious and humorous, sad and uplifting (Hass, 1984). His poems are marked by “random
collocations of things,” which the poet has referred to as '’gatherings,'' left random (Hoffman,
1997). The New York Times described Hass as a poet who “sings a kind of Californian omnivalence: family, friends, conversation, anecdote, history, reading, wild animals and birds, his
beloved flowers and grasses are all strummed in the arpeggios of the poems” (Hoffman, 1997).
Hass leads the reader to wonder out loud, “How ineffectual and natural and small and significant
and brittle and resilient and resonant we are!” (L. Drapeau, personal communication, November
30, 2013).
This integration of poetry and technology involved accessing a series of “Learning
Events” constructed by an expanding group of university professors and offered to the online
#WalkMyWorld community that spans PK-university participants and classrooms across North
America and potentially beyond. Graduate students made their own choices regarding working
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with the poems, their digital collections, and entered into learning events of their own choosing,
though they were introduced to all. The work led students to write original poetry (defined in very
broad scope to accommodate poetry-phobes) as a class assignment; they were invited but not
required to share their work through the social media tool Twitter. In class, students shared digital
collections and poetry and exchanged them with an eye toward reflecting upon “walks” in their
own and others’ “worlds.” (The option to exchange with other classes at other universities
through social media was offered but not required.) Ultimately, in line with couse goals, we
considered whether and in what ways participation in #WalkMyWorld influenced graduate
students’ definitions of their own “self” and “place” in multicultural education. In follow-up,
students were urged to consider how these insights might influence their developing definitions of
Multicultural Education (a focal course objective) and whether the whole enterprise— employing
digital tools and poetry and participating in an Internet based social media project— amounted to
channeling “tough topics” toward productive rather than unproductive tension in the Multicultural
Education course.
A #WalkMyWorld Retrospective
As the instructor, I originally planned to gather data toward a research project related to
the questions about Multicultural Education courses raised above as they relate to
#WalkMyWorld. The reasons I did not ultimately conduct formal research at this time led to my
contribution to this alternative session. Foremost, due to the social media aspect of the project, I
encountered challenging issues in arenas that I have categorized as The Four “Ps”: Permission,
Purpose, Participation, and Privacy. At LRA 2014, I bring these issues to the (round)table for
examination, conversation, and open dialogue that can inform future research—my own and
others’. A nutshell of each arena for discussion is provided in the remainder of this paper.
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Permission
In early dialogue with IRB, I reported plans to conduct research that would involve work
with colleagues at various universities to seek patterns in participation and content construction
across diverse higher education courses. Whereas I planned to integrate the project into a graduate
Multicultural Education Course, others planned employ it with preservice and in-service teachers
in Content Area Literacy, Writing, or Educational Technology Courses. The proposition to
conduct research under IRB approval from another institution for a collaborative project caused
resistance from my home institution due to nature of social media/Internet-based project and
perceived risk to students.
I therefore sought IRB approval “at home,” expecting that my research would be
considered exempt or not need full IRB review, since my students would simply complete an
authentic syllabus assignment as part of a required education graduate course. However, with
knowledge that times are changing and that the social media aspect of the project ostensibly
makes classwork “public,” I thought it wise to apply to IRB to ensure responsible research. I
integrated and introduced #WalkMyWorld as part of the natural flow of coursework and worked
to effectively minimize any risk and maximize educational benefits for student participants.
Students in my course would be permitted to use the class hashtag alone (rather than the
#WalkMyWorld hashtag); they could opt of having their Twitter handle included in any future
data collection for research purposes; and, there were to be no grade consequence for opting out.
Securing IRB approval my home institution nevertheless caused similar hesitation. The
public/Internet-Based aspect of the project represented “new ground” for the Board, would have
taken much time for consideration and potential approval, and thus halted my research plans.
Purpose
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Since #WalkMyWorld fit, like any project, text, or assignment, into my authentic plans for
teaching, I abandoned formal research plans but included the project on my syllabus, with no
plans to collect or analyze data. For my class, #WalkMyWorld became part of an assignment
entitled: Unique Explorations of our own Multicultural Education: Part One—Images of
Identity (Technology, Social Media) Part Two— Poetry, Race, and Diversity: (Developing Our
Understandings through Young Adult Literature). Specifically, participation in #WalkMyWorld
provided a means to explore Multicultural Education through literal and figurative “images” of
identity. In many ways, the work was productive; but; ultimately, for my students, it lacked a
tangible focus. Since #WalkMyWorld was in its early stages when I was teaching the course,
several factors may have obscured students’ clear sense of “purpose.”
First, online content (i.e., Blogs that introduced learning events) appeared from various
individuals and in various formats, continually and recursively linking and evolving across
authors and modes. These creative efforts to encourage participants to engage in online practices
and better understand social media and networking thus required willingness and aptitude to
navigate new and ever-evolving platforms. In my class, I sensed that course-specific purpose
may have been confounded by the technology. Those who already had Twitter, Instagram, and
Vine accounts has no problem, but those who did not took weeks to “get connected.”
Second, a focal objective of the course involved students working to define Multicultural
Education for themselves. While connections between noticing one’s own “walk,” “walking in
another’s shoes,” #WalkMyWorld, and multicultural educations seemed clear to me, as the project
proceeded, #WalkMyWorld took on a life of its own—characterized by non-linear trajectories that
required more abstract thinking and insights than my students appeared willing to invest.
Relatedly, it seems that a prerequisite appreciation of “social scholarship,” which interweaves
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formal scholarship with informal, social and Internet-based practices (Wise & O’Byrne, 2014) was
clearly foreign to students in the multicultural education. Students’ connections between the
project and the course were largely surface level—for instance, they noted that tweeted cell phone
images provided a way to look at yourself in a different light, i.e., a ski photo triggered thoughts
about privilege and socioeconomic status.
Participation
Though graduate students are clearly used to variations of “required participation” in
activities in and outside of class (e.g., presenting on readings, practice teaching, field
work/observations), my students’ communicated a different sort of resistance to participation in
#WalkMyWorld. Participation seemed to afford more insights to those were already using social
media, accessing Blogs, etc., than for those who felt uncomfortable “putting themselves out
there.” Consequently, I take pause with regard to future research involving social media
especially related to coursework on social justice and multicultural education. It would be sadly
ironic to create unexpected disparities and/or power hierarchies with such research; instead, we
may need to prepare and empower students toward motivated participation or choose populations
more deliberately.
The assignment revealed "resisters" even beyond those who were uncomfortable with
new media and technologies. As one who primarily teaches content area/disciplinary literacy
courses, I found the resistance strikingly similar to early resistance to “every teacher is a teacher
of reading” (Beers, 2003; Tovani, 2000), before the literacy field began thinking about literacies
through the lenses of specific disciplines (Fang, 2014; Moje, 2008, Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012;
VanSledright, 2012; Wineburg, 2001). Many students didn't see the connection between poetry,
technology and their content area instruction; they saw #WalkMyWorld as “just a class project.”
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Though students actually shared in class and posted online heartfelt, well-considered responses to
poetry and composed well-crafted pieces of their own, students who felt that poetry, technology,
and online content creation didn’t have a place in their subject appeared to resist. Future work
with this project, I will consider purpose related to specific content areas, so participation in the
project would seem more relevant to pre-service and inservice teachers’ future classrooms.
Privacy
Students openly discussed privacy concerns. Some wished to know what I “wanted”
from the class with regard to images, video, Tweets, etc. Others understood that the assignment
had no right answers, but were still perplexed and worried about propriety and privacy.
Considerations involved deciding whether or not to share with your classmates (and professor!) a
picture of yourself at a club or on a train at 3:00 am—or, to just take a picture of your dog in the
morning and call that your “walk” in your “world.” As I learned through class discussion,
either/or issues—i.e., the idea that Tweeted images were either “school appropriate” or
“authentic” posed an issue worth noting for future research. Questions remain: Are propriety and
authenticity mutually exclusive? Does an authentic post amount to relinquishment of privacy?
Other privacy issues came up in the name of feeling “awkward” using social media with
classmates. I initially thought that it would be helpful if classmates all followed each other, but I
came to believe that it was awkward for students to make the move to follow and comment on
other’s posts, without feeling like they were “silently creeping.” I got the sense that if this
behavior had been assigned or required by me, it would have been less socially uncomfortable,
and privacy would have been less of an issue. It was as if “rules of the classroom” in which
#WalkMyWorld took place superseded the evolving “rules” of typical/normal social media
behavior, and I couldn’t change that. Guarded social media behavior, in part due to concerns
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about social propriety and in part due to concerns about personal privacy makes getting to
“authentic” feel both far-reaching in potential and unreachable in practice.
Discussing the Four P’s
Roundtable discussion at the Literacy Research Association Conference provides a perfect
forum for reviewing my retrospective on #WalkMyWorld as a class project and with regard to my
own future research. Each “P” opens potential for participating graduate students, professors, and
researchers to share their own challenges and promises associated with similar project in online
spaces.
References
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