As the second week of the semester comes to a close, I’m thinking about the experiences of teaching and learning online in a pandemic that will likely stay with us for a long while. Throughout the summer, as faculty at Muhlenberg prepared for what President Harring has called “the most distinctive academic year in Muhlenberg’s history,” one concern wove throughout each week of Camp Design Online, every discussion board, every video conversation, and the text informing our work together: how do we foster and feed community in online learning?
The conversation among faculty on this enduring topic generated many examples, approaches, and possibilities. Guidance from the Camp Design Online instructors, together with creativity and insights from Faculty Digital Fellows and Digital Learning Assistants, contributed greatly to an expansive sense of possibility. Many of these possibilities are documented and available in Canvas discussion boards for Camp Design Online cohorts, where faculty can continue to draw inspiration from peers.
To further widen our sense of what may be possible in building community in online learning, I am excited to share this expanding resource from a diverse group of educators and scholars who bring critical, caring, expert voices to these challenges. Co-facilitators of Equity Unbound,“an equity-focused, open, connected learning experience,” have partnered with OneHE to develop, curate and share a growing variety of open educational resources for online community-building. Here are the co-creators of this initiative with an overview of what you’ll find here and why they created it:
Our approach to online learning in the liberal arts has always framed this work around the importance of community. In centering community in digital learning, we also invite reflection on our assumptions about what constitutes community, who is included and who is excluded, where community resides and how it is accessed and sustained. This is more vital than ever, as students and faculty alike carry on teaching and learning amidst the everyday experiences of a protracted pandemic. Our efforts to build hospitable, inclusive, productive space for learning occurs against the backdrop of loss, grief, and trauma, lived and experienced unevenly by our students and their families. This only amplifies the need for efforts value and enact community. In the above video, Autumm Caines, of the University of Michigan at Dearborn, describes this as the practice of “intentionally equitable hospitality.” Autumm and co-authors define this concept more fully in this article, “Intentionally Equitable Hospitality in Hybrid Video Dialogue: The context of virtually connecting.” The practices shared and available for adaptation on this website aim to support and extend practices of intentionally equitable hospitality in online learning spaces. They invite educators to pay close attention to the ways that digital spaces are both welcoming and unwelcoming, open and closed, inclusive and exclusive, hospitable and inhospitable. As the co-creators note:
Any technique can block some people out, make them feel unwelcomed, or be used in a way that privileges some and makes it harder on others. All of these techniques should be used in conjunction with pedagogies of care and what we call Intentionally Equitable Hospitality.
http://unboundeq.creativitycourse.org/activities/community-building-online-open-resources-from-oneheglobal-unboundeq/
As the opening weeks of the semester fade and we get deeper into the heart of our courses, remember that community-building happens over the long haul and requires a kind of consideration of ethics, power, privacy, and risk. In remarks on safety considerations in online community-building, Kate Bowles (University of Wollongong, Australia) observes:
The community building activities that are shared here have been designed to suit learners in many different cultural contexts, and they are framed by a philosophy of intentionally equitable hospitality and a pedagogy of care.
Most instructors will have the experience and knowledge of their students’ situation to make wise choices about activities that will work best.
However, when choosing community building activities that ask students to disclose information about themselves, and especially about how they are feeling, it is important to recognise the risk of unintended harm.
Indeed, this is what I find most valuable and distinct about this collection of resources for faculty teaching online. While each resource is accompanied by a video demonstrating or describing the practice, as well as slides and further artifacts that can be remixed and reused, informing the entire project is the awareness and attention directed towards the possibility that “[a]ny technique can block some people out, make them feel unwelcomed, or be used in a way that privileges some and makes it harder on others.” For that reason, the co-creators invite critical engagement and reflection on activities and exercises that, in your own practice, you find inhospitable or unwelcoming in whatever way.
If you would like to talk with an instructional designer about any of these activities for building community online, or share practices you’ve developed, please sign up for an appointment from the weekly schedule here: https://archive.diglearn.bergbuilds.domains/getting-assistance-faculty-staff/
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