Attending to Relationships in the Virtual Environment

By Jenn McColl

When I first switched to emergency online teaching during the pandemic, my biggest concern was how to attend to relationships in the virtual environment. This concern arises from a fundamental belief that all useful learning must be aimed at the creation of situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988). I am never an all-knowing other as a teacher, but rather a co-labourer in the field, dependent on the lived experiences and insights of my students for much of the production of knowledge within the classroom.

This is both an epistemological and ontological belief about the nature of teaching and learning but it is also borne out by neuroscience. Increasingly, we’re coming to understand the impact of the social- relational environment on learning. In his neurosequential model of education, Dr. Bruce Perry talks about the need to regulate and relate before we can reason. This idea is echoed in work by Dr. Dan Siegel on interpersonal neurobiology and his research that shows that the optimal state for learning requires social engagement. People of all ages need to feel safe, seen, and secure in order to learn.

But how do we do we create a community of care from our bedrooms over a computer screen?

To answer this question, I began taking courses through the Teaching Commons and thinking about how to wed what I do live with research-based approaches to online teaching. Based on feedback from students in my current courses, I think I’ve acquired some helpful tips to share. I have groups of students emailing me to find out what I’m teaching next so they can continue together. What’s more, I’m enjoying online teaching so much that I’ve signed up to teach a remote summer course on overload just “for fun.”

Creating Productive Small Groups:

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to create stable, consistent small groups that “meet” every week either asynchronously through forum posts, synchronously in breakout rooms, or a mix of both.

There is only one of me but there are 25-50 students per class. I usually have 200 students per semester. I can’t possibly create a sense of being seen on my own. Successful small groups create accountability and a culture of high expectations. They also give students that crucial sense of being known and seen. Relationships flourish. Learning is rooted in shared experiences.

Jenn, I have to let you know the small group dynamic is a game changer in this course. I feel so connected to my group members, as if I have met them several times. I have never seen such respect and friendship in an asynchronous course. It is so much more effective than posting weekly to a large group, things get lost in the shuffle that way and you pay less attention to whose work you are reading and replying to. I feel so great when I read the comments from my peers. Thank you for doing this for us.

anonymous student

Set Up:

Before the students arrive, I go into GAM and download my class list. I sort by major and look to place students in the same programs together. I look to see if I’ve had any of the students in my class before and, particularly, if they’ve been together before. I often send a survey a week in advance asking about interests and goals for the course. I use all of this information to try to create groups that will have some commonalities.

In terms of Universal Design for Learning, students always have the choice to share video, audio, or written posts. I make sure that weekly readings can be read by text-to-voice software and often provide a choice of a podcast, TED Talk, or article on the same topic – or choice of two articles coming at the same ideas from two different angles.

Valuing Participation:

I weight participation in the forums between 25-30% because I am asking for an on-going, sustained commitment and effort. The rubric includes the following criteria:

• Weekly posts express compassion for and interest in peers
• Posts are reflective, thoughtful, and written for a peer audience
• They are completed on time
• They make direct connections to course texts
• They include evidence of analysis and evaluation
• They share relevant resources and ideas beyond the texts
• Replies encourage critical thinking and further discussion

In Week 1, we look at the rubric together and talk about what my expectations are. If it’s an asynchronous course, they’re usually asked to post one observation and one question about the rubric in the discussion forum. In Week 6, I ask students to complete the rubric as an exercise in self-assessment and ask them to set an improvement goal for the second half of the course. I also ask if there are any issues that I should be aware of within the group. I send feedback to each student highlighting strengths at this point.

Building Community:

Their first post is an ice breaker. I ask them to include a photo or a bitmoji to put a face to their name. I always give 3-5 choices of questions so students can decide which aspects of themselves to reveal. I try to make the questions a little cheeky to infuse some humour but also connected to the course. For example, when I was teaching a New Media Literacies course, I asked:

1. What's one of your not-too-guilty media pleasures and why should we share it? Sell us on it!
2. One of your grandparents wants to learn how to play a new video game. Which game will you teach and why? Should all grandparents learn this game or only yours?
3. If you could live out the pandemic as any fictional character from a media text who would you be and why? What skills and experiences do they bring that are especially useful right now?

I also make it clear continually that the audience for each post is their peers – not me. What can they write about each week’s content that will further the understanding of their peers? How are they connecting content to past experience, observation, or future practice?

Relevant, Student-Centred Discussions:

The meat of each week’s post is also geared to the co-creation of knowledge. I use Bloom’s Taxonomy in my question design to ensure that students are asked to apply, analyze or evaluate ideas in the texts, rather than summarizing. I provide a choice of open-ended questions or discussion prompts. I ask students to connect ideas to prior knowledge or observations. Some weeks, tasks are differentiated so that each person in the group assumes a different structured role. Other weeks, I use open-ended discussion strategies like Save the Last Word, Thoughts-Questions-Epiphanies, or 3-2-1.

More recently, I’ve begun experimenting with having students sign up as moderators for the each week in the second half of the course. They take turns generating prompts and facilitating the discussion. This seems to be generating even more engagement.

An academic advantage is that when discussions are structured in this way, they’re essentially plagiarism-proof. The onus is on the student to connect first-hand experience to theory. They can’t borrow someone else’s experience to do this.