Communities and connections

The question of what it means to form a community is one that is sometimes taken for granted when it comes to learning spaces and experiences, but in a public speaking course that I teach, it has been a central question. In this post, I talk about how that question has been addressed, and I end with questions about how to recreate this sense of community in an online space.

I’ve taught this course for a few semesters now, and it has been running long before I came on board. So we are talking here about a course that has a history. Part of that history is a focus on small group learning, even though at its start, the course would run with 600 students each semester. How do you make sure every student has a community when they are one among such a crowd? It isn’t enough to think of dividing them into tutorial groups. We know that for many courses, the lecture/tutorial format may allow for the creation of smaller groups, but this doesn’t automatically create a sense of community. It is what goes on in those groups that counts – creating a community has to be a goal, and the design of the lessons has to be directed towards that goal. Here is what we do in the course to ensure each student has a sense of being part of a community:

1. We keep the groups small: Over the years, the tutorial groups have become smaller and smaller. We started with around 20 in a group, and now we have no more than 10. What we have observed is that as the numbers shrink, the students report greater levels of satisfaction with the learning experience.
2. We put in place performance and feedback routines: For most of the weeks, the students are preparing and delivering speeches. While they deliver individual speeches, at the preparation stage they touch base with one another, share ideas, and generally connect very closely. By the time they are ready to deliver the speeches they are rooting for one another to succeed. While each student is speaking, the others are providing detailed feedback on a google doc. There are also sharing circles where they affirm one another’s efforts, suggest improvements, and engage with the ideas that they have brought forth. The stability of the routines for each round of speeches creates a reliable support and feedback structure.
3. We have diverse groups: This is one of the few courses that are open to students from all faculties, and even exchange students. About a third of the students each semester are usually from other countries, and we have students from the medical, business, engineering, architecture, science, arts, and law faculties. This means that there is a range of knowledge, skills, opinions and methods that are brought into the learning space. Students usually come away feeling invigorated by the exchanges.
4. We use an empathetic approach: Tutors on the teaching team are trained to conduct the sessions in such a way that they connect with individual students and facilitate connections among students. Many students experience anxiety when they have to deliver a speech, and it doesn’t help that the speeches are graded. However tutors use various strategies to de-escalate the tension, and even grades are released with detailed feedback that is framed as suggestions for improvement and affirmations of success. This sets in place a model for students, such that despite the unavoidable frame of competition, the classroom becomes a safe space where growth can take place in a very different way than many students may have been used to.

The point is not that this is radical in any way. But that these are some of the methods that we have used to create a sense of community that nurtures the development of empathetic and ethical speakers. What immediately stands out is how embodied this is. Bodies in a common physical space, relating to one another. What happens when this has to go online? How do we maintain that sense of community? This is my challenge for the coming semester. Due to COVID-19, in all likelihood we will not be able to conduct face-to-face classes as we did before, so I have to think about how to create community in new ways.

In our PBL group we talked a lot about the challenges and strategies of building community for online learning. I realise there were other components – the notion of networks, the idea of collaboration. But I think that at the core of networking and collaboration is the notion of community – some sense of a common purpose, of shared goals, of each person being invested in everyone else’s growth. Perhaps some of the things that built community before can remain. We can still have small groups. We can still have diverse groups. But I think it is still the many subtle ways in which we relate to other human beings that are difficult to replicate in online spaces. Perhaps it would be foolish to try.