Cultivating a PLN With No “Other”

Building a diverse and inclusive PLN sounds simple until you try it, because the hard part isn’t inviting different voices in. It’s making sure they aren’t treated as guests in someone else’s network. The first challenge: Moore (2016) describes an “inclusion” diagram in which a few differently patterned dots sit inside a bubble of identical ones, and a student noticed that it still showed an “other.” A PLN can look the same, and media justice activists made a similar point when they rejected “paternalistic conceptualizations of ‘access'” (Pooley, 2011, p. 220). Moore’s answer is to value what is diverse so that everyone is “an other.” A second challenge is institutional power. Bartlett, Marshall, and Marshall (2012) describe Cape Breton University’s Integrative Science program, built on “Two-Eyed Seeing,” in which twenty-seven Mi’kmaw students graduated, yet no students have enrolled since 2007, a decline the authors attribute to institutional politics. Good intentions, in other words, need structural support. Differences in language and pace add a third challenge: Dunbar-Hester (2011) found that activists needed research quickly for policy fights while slow academic publishing risked leaving it “stale,” and Ryan and Gamson (2011) found that real collaboration took five to seven years. The readings point to overlapping approaches, namely learning together as co-learners rather than as experts and recipients (Bartlett et al., 2012), starting from strengths rather than deficits (Moore, 2016), and investing in lasting relationships instead of one-off contact (Ryan & Gamson, 2011).