2. DID OUR PROJECT MEET KEY GOALS
OF MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION?
We have already framed what we adopted as key goals for multicultural education at the time we undertook this project.  At this point in our presentation, we are asking ourselves both whether we achieved these goals and whether that formulation of the goals is adequate for further development of the strategy of student web writing in multicultural studies.

 

Note: Kathy will be unable to physically attend the conference this weekend. Listen to what she has to say about her "virtual" presence. 
Kathy's view: 
In my view, the project amply demonstrates the potential of student web writing
to enhance, deepen, or in our case substitute for experiences of other cultures. 

Cora's Comment #1:
The fact that Humanities 299 students published
their projects on the World Wide Web was transformative in itself.
World Wide Web-publication necessarily breaks boundaries
that traditionally limit instructional discourse
to self-contained learning communities of known students and teachers,
circumscribed within semi-private (protected) classroom spaces.
"Going Online" carries exciting possibilities and daunting risks for students and teachers alike.
On the one hand, our Hum 299 students were emboldened to proceed at all by 
Reed Way Dasenbrock's precept that cross-cultural multicultural study
is an arena of learning and change. But I also think that the implications
of such boundary-crossing so publicly on the global World Wide Web
impressed themselves early and indelibly upon Hum 299 students.
Realizing that their websites could, and would eventually,  reach heterogeneous audiences
--including and especially people who belong to the subject-positions addressed in
students' cross-cultural websites--made our students much more sensitive
to adhering to Royster's "code of conduct"--"respectful, reciprocal, and responsible"--
than they would have been in writing traditional course assignments on cross-cultural topics.

 

.Kathy's view (continued): Listen to Kathy's comments, or read the text version that follows:
The project succeeded in ways that have caused me to rethink some of my initial assumptions or concerns. Informative web writing as it is frequently practiced results in a mere list of blind links, with no analysis or creator engagement evident.  Such sites can have an imperialist tone: one senses an exploring, voyaging "I" intent upon procuring sites, expanding one’s information base by claiming the information posted by others.  For this reason, I promoted the focus on collaboration in our original proposal, believing that a small group conferring together might best achieve a deeper experience and avoid  publishing a mere list of sites (each of which are often lists of other sites). 

Cora's Comment #2:
The standard academic genre (with a long history, I might add)
used for "claiming [i.e. colonizing] the information...of others"
is the stand-alone (annotated) bibliography--or its WWW variant, the "webliography."
I think what Kathy has in mind is what some web-authoring guides
(disparagingly) call a "link farm," and others call (more neutrally) call a "pointer site,"
which denotes that the webpage primarily just points (links) to other WWW sites.
In WWW arenas, as in other scholarly venues, "blind links" are bad in any case,
leaving web-users to presume (implicitly) that listed sources are at least relevant to the topic.
But even if given full(er) bibliographical and substantive (content summaries) information,
serious students in the WWW academic domain want, and are right to expect,
bibliographer's critical annotations assessing the quality of the listed (linked) sources.
In Hum 299, I did present the critical Annotated Bibliography [Webliography]
as one accepted/acceptable academic genre in which
students could present their research findings on their websites
But if my students chose the genre of the Annotated Bibliography/Webliography,
I also required that their sources (WWW, print, other) not only be fully documented and
 recommendable, applying persuasive academic evaluative criteria that students could articulate;
but also be annotated, articulating explicitly how each source met such criteria and
expressing any reservations or weaknesses students had about the quality of the source..
Cora's Confession:
My expectations were not always met, however earnestly students aspired to meet them,
when students chose the Annotated Bibliography as their web-genre 
Cora's Disclaimers:
(1) Most students in Hum 299, a lower-division course, had no prior experience
with this kind of academic assignment (i.e. writing a critical Annotated Bibliography,
much less a Bibliographical Essay or Review of Literature/Research  in the field)
(2) Challenging constrictions on developing more ambitiously original website content
obtained in Hum 299, given competencies that students were required
 to develop and demonstrate in the 10-week quarter.)

We would like to know what you think:
Consider the above concerns while reviewing the following Hum 299 student web sites
as cases in which students decided to present annotated bibliographies:

U. S. Immigrant Literature
by Dan Farring & Sam Farring

Holocaust & Mass Genocide
by Amy Branaugh

farring.jpg (59028 bytes)

amy.jpg (32875 bytes)

Join the discussion now . . .

Kathy's view (continued):
However, while collaboration was promoted in the class, I believe it was Cora’s focus on a declared and articulated purpose for each student project (whether a group or individual project) that  promoted genuine multicultural learning through these projects. All of the web sites to some degree, and the best of them to a large degree, develop around a key purpose that the student writer has wanted her web page to achieve, and Hum 299 students did their best to communicate their purpose to their audience. Thus the students make clear contributions to academic dialogue around their topics; they do not simply compile long decorated lists of links. 

Sonja Menard's Latina Authors site, for example, is subtitled "Power through education," and her stated focus makes clear that the authors she includes have a common bond, enabling the site user to study a specific topic: "Most of the women I chose have two things in common, the belief that education is vital for women and more women must be trained to be self sufficient." 

Latina Writers
by Sonja Menard

African Folktales
by Colleen Matthews

latina.jpg (111047 bytes)

colleen.jpg (61083 bytes)

Colleen Mathews, author of "African Folktales," states, "My purpose in these webpages is to take a selection of African folktales and try to cross-reference them to other cultures using motif and type classification."

Another assumption that this project has caused me to surface and reexamine is the assumption that the student projects, to be effective in multicultural learning, should be clear, transparent, and clearly informative. Some of the student work is more expressive than informative, for example, the web site which is aimed at expressing the student’s sense of the "contact zone" (Dawn Hendrix). 

Exploring the Contact Zone
by Dawn Hendrix [Smith]

Multicultural Resource Site
by Karen Kitt

dawn.jpg (87087 bytes)

karen.jpg (34976 bytes)

Since the aim of the course is to expand the student web-writer’s multicultural understanding (and the expansion of the multicultural understandings of the web project’s audience is only a by-product), then I think that ultimately those sites that more clearly demonstrate expanded experience most clearly meet that standard. And the project that I think is the most polished, complete, and helpful informative project, Karen Kitt's resource guide for middle school teachers, may or may not have actually added to Karen’s multicultural education. It may be, however, that this emphasis on the value of experiencing a different culture, or having an experience beyond the bounds of one’s own culture, is unique to a homogeneous area such as ours.

Judge for yourself: 
Visit Showcase of (all) HUM 299 Student Web Sites
from Spring 2000 and 2001, follow the hyperlinks,
investigate the sites on your own, then let us know what you think!

Continue Our Online Presentation . . . 

3. What is the relationship between the invitingly open form of web writing and our project outcomes?

 

What do you think? Join the Discussion:


ASA Panel Participants
Please comment at
Making It Public:
Web board Discussion

We welcome comments
from all our web-visitors:
Kathy Walsh  kwalsh@cocc.edu  
Cora Agatucci  cagatucci@cocc.edu

  Home Page | Online Presentation | Site Map
Going Online to Develop and Communicate
Student Perspectives on Multicultural and World Writers
URL of this webpage: http://www.cocc.edu/ASA/MCdialogue.htm   
 Last updated: 05 November 2001
© Kathleen Walsh and Cora Agatucci, 2001
Central Oregon Community College

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