Center for Teaching & Learning Sheila Jaswal & Joe Trapani (Chemistry)

Our draft plan for community building is broken into two parts, 1) what activities are currently employed and 2) what activities are planned to be employed.

PART 1. Activities currently employed in HSTEM 

• What activity(ies) do you employ at the start of the semester so that you can:
  • get to know your students
  • they can get to know you
  • they can connect with their peers
  • Answer: We share who we are as humans and scholars in the first class (slides linked here). Airplane activity is used to allow students to share how they feel included and what they do to help others feel included. This information is used to improve the inclusivity of the course and it makes explicit to the students what the other classmates need to feel included.
• What strategies do you embed within your course throughout the semester to reinforce this sense of community?
  • Answer: We would start the class period with relaxing guitar music as student filtered in at 8:30AM, and we would have the tables set up so we were in a circle, and we would start with everyone sharing one word for their mood to help transition into a learning community.
• How did these strategies for community building respond to the in-person and remote modes of instruction last spring? 
  • Answer: To help transition students into the class during our online meetings, we often started with small breakout groups with a facilitator in each, so students could check in about how they were doing in a more intimate setting. We added the feature of hanging around after class officially ended to chat more informally. This included asking students to show their pets, younger siblings, baby pictures, and other interesting artifacts from their current setting.
• How did these strategies relate to and support your overarching goals for student learning in your class
  • Answer: We plan for and integrate ongoing community building as one of the pillars of the course, and we share this with the students in the syllabus, the first class, and periodically refer back to it. See the graphic that illustrates this course’s modes for inclusion and community: 

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PART 2: Activities to be employed 

In this section, we will focus on activities that will be new and relevant to both the ACUE information on building community and the remote nature of the course moving forward:

• What activity(ies) do you employ at the start of the semester so that you can:
  • a. get to know your students
  • b. they can get to know you
  • c. they can connect with their peers
  • Answer a: INTRODUCTORY ASSIGNMENT
    • Get to know your students: The first assignment for the students will then be to post something that shares who they are, how they like to be called, why they’re taking the class, how it connects to their life, what they feel confident about bringing, and what they are anxious about. They will complete this after viewing the introductory videos in 1b.
  • Answer b: INTRODUCTORY VIDEOS
    • Get to know your Instructors: We will create introductory video posts, ideally highlighting a variety of ways to express our authentic human selves. We will share 1) why we each are teaching this course, 2) touch upon how our intersecting identities have impacted our STEM journeys (including our Sociology & LatinX studies colleagues), 3) how our involvement in the course connects to our lives, and explicitly share what we are bringing with our disciplinary and lived experience, and 4) where we hope to grow (and may have some anxiety about).
    • Get to know your course: We will record a Moodle, Google Drive, & Syllabus Orientation video to share how to navigate these important aspects of the course. We will also create a video of some brief video excerpts from former students of HSTEM courses over the past 4 years sharing how they have been impacted by their participation in the course.
  • Answers c: ACCOUNTABILITY PODS
    • Get to know your peers: have the students belong to smaller groups that provide logistical accountability – making sure group members are present, texting them if they aren’t, checking in before assignments/reflections are due, etc. In that case, perhaps a completely random assignment is fine.  These could be randomly generated simply through breakout rooms in the first class meeting. Alternatively we could do the following activity.
    • Creating Groups exercise: Another idea is to give students some agency in deciding the criteria for making the groups. We could be transparent about our goals in putting the groups together- accountability, a smaller community pod they can get to know better than all 18 of the students, and have a class discussion about whether there might be additional goals for groups if we constituted them non-randomly. To get a snapshot of who we are as a learning community in terms of a variety of factors that would give information that could be used to constitute non-random groups, we could have students fill out a pre-class survey that might ask about major(s), timezone, STEM courses taken, identities they hold that they are comfortable sharing (NOT multiple choice but short answer so they aren’t putting themselves into boxes but expressing their identities as they choose), what are their strengths in working with a group, where would they like to grow in working with a group, what helps them stay engaged in remote learning, where might they see themselves encountering challenges in this course, what ideas they have for how they might best be supported in a peer group (sharing ideas about how that might look). We could then present the results of the survey in an anonymous fashion and have a class discussion about different ways groups could be assigned- time zones, maximize or minimize difference across identity, mix of group strengths, people who would like to be supported in similar ways, etc.  Even if the decision ultimately came down to stick to random, having students consider their own group-work abilities, and their needs/desires for support in remote learning and this specific class, would be a valuable learning activity—in addition to learning why groups are often made the way they are...

•  What strategies will you embed within your course throughout the semester to reinforce this sense of community? How will these strategies for community building respond to the potential modes of instruction you may employ in January (remote)?
  • Answer: We will continue to welcome the students with relaxing music as they join the zoom. We will continue to use a mix of practices - one word sharing, breakout group check-ins, at the beginning of class. The pods will help to connect students together outside of class time. We will set up shared office hour zoom sessions with both sections of the course, possibly with breakout rooms for specific topics, which will help build larger community with all HSTEM students.

• How do these strategies relate to and support your overarching goals for student learning in your class?
  • Answer: All of these strategies contribute to our overall goals of building community and developing skills in working together.