“Walk a mile in my shoes” is a way of saying “see things from my perspective.” But shoes are also a status symbol and a marker of inequity. Dani thought these two aspects of shoes could make them the perfect entry point for a study of identity and diversity. To prepare, she and Anna listened to shoe songs, watched documentaries on shoe designers and extreme users, and planned reading material around sustainability issues within shoe production. Using the Teaching Tolerance standards, they were able to make their study of shoes a vehicle to teach about identity, empathy, injustice, and activism.

They launched the project with a mystery challenge — staff members contributed photos of their shoes, with snippets about where the shoes had taken them. The students needed to match the shoes to the people, learning and reflecting on their inference process and creating a collage of staff members that hung outside the classroom for the rest of the year.

Dani and Anna created an extensive reading list of fiction and non-fiction about shoes and also about identity and diversity. Reading was differentiated and students had a choice in what they read. For whole group reading and learning, the class read about Michael Jordan and the Air Jordan designer Tinker Hatfield, and about the Disney designer Mary Blair. One of the most intensive whole group reading and writing projects was a close reading and analysis of the Mackelmore song Wing$ — a first person story of a boy’s obsession with brand name sneakers and his growing understanding of the negative impact of the brand status of products.