Developing community - a sense of connection and belonging through our experiences

 At our recent NetNZ hui I facilitated a discussion group. The topic was around 'Whanaungatanga'. Now this is a word that has quite deep meanings in Te Ao Māori and we need to spend time unpacking this as an organisation. To my understanding, and I have much to learn in this area, it comes down to a sense of kinship and belonging developed through shared experiences. 


We spent some time discussing:
What does this idea mean and why is it important?
What are the strategies that we have tried?
How do we know when it's working?
Any other ideas we had.

Guiding questions
What are community, connections, and relationships about and why are they important?	Strategies we use?	How do we know when it's working?	Issues/ Questions/ Comments
Need to build trust and need to be connected to share ideas together	Multi-modal ways of sharing	They keep showing up (this is a form of engagement)	Community, how to sustain it?
Whanaungatanga is a special way of relating that has an important connection to te ao Māori	Know when to intervene if a disconnection is arriving	Attendance	How to balance modular courses and developing relationships
Know me before you teach me	The old e-learning days to connect face to face	They talk	Can be difficult to build a sense of belonging when you have multiple enrolments from one school, as these students can clump together
Humans = social creatures	Start with relationships and community as a central thing and keep circling back to this regularly	They give feedback	Lockdown. During this time there were different kinds of connections that developed. Often students were more engaged.
Learning happens in a positive social and emotional environment. In languages, there has to be a safe positive rapport for students to feel comfortable speaking and learning from mistakes	Tell us something about you that you want all of us to know	They come	Having no previous connections might make some students feel alienated at the beginning of the course
Learning that matters is always constructed with others	Flexible course design to allow room for relationship and assessment sits in the background	When you see the online sessions reflected in the work
Belonging to a course/community is building relationships and confidence in learning	Student feedback - seek it and use it	When they ask questions
Relationships foundation to e-learning. Keep coming back to it.	Begin with digital mihi connecting where from	When they interrupt to ask a question
Important as a source of motivation and accountability	Connect with prior learning and celebrate this	Uploading their own resources to the community
Trust	Sharing on a human level	Their feedback (shows they care about the learning and the community
Even participation	Work out who needs extra awhi and support	Feel that they can help each other. (Teacher as a facilitator rather than a dictator)
Belonging is important so that I 'students' know I am not alone.	Humour - make it fun	They'll turn up
Get to know me, don't judge me, work with me, talk with me not at me.	Collaborative spaces	They'll participate
I belong, this is my community, I am connected.	Get to know lots about them and who they are	They'll communicate
Learning as a community, acknowledging what they bring, their backgrounds	Kahoots about each other	Students start connecting on a human level with each other and the teacher
Social/confidence, support/fight isolation	Use Tuakana - Teina relationships to encourage students	They act on feedback (from the teacher and each other and seek it in an ongoing way
Supports, similar interests	Students have to trust you. Shown through: Consistency, positivity, show you care through consistent regular communication, gratitude for the input, and interest in them	The way the students behave, e.g. students running the class when the teacher has technical difficulties
Seeing where you fit, connections, relationships	Use break out rooms for small group discussion to put students at ease, providing a safe space to discuss ideas	They feel comfortable to contribute
Feel confident to share ideas, safety.	First 5 minutes an icebreaker every VC
Trust, so that students feel comfortable. If they feel comfortable they are open to learning	Students leading a starter topic
Belonging and connection are important. Learning a new language requires some risk and vulnerability, it also requires students to communicate. Language is connected to culture -> can't be separated.	Word games
	Create collaborative docs, which increase visibility
	Make video introductions show who you are
	Checking in Checking out each VC
	Remembering what's happening in their world
	Connecting each week discussing topical things
	Staying eternally positive
	Don't overwhelm students, build up to the assessment through learning activities
	Reinforce the development of student profiles and using these during the year
	Using the support of the teacher and the e-dean to help engage
	Be proactive
	Encourage students to share whenever possible
	In Social Studies students can plan social actions as a unique response to the needs of their community
	Invest a lot of time in building community and relationships initially, continually build on this throughout the year
	Students leading things like 'catch up questions'
	Start with small silly things to get them comfortable to talk
	Hit the answer with a question
	Showing you are human and it is ok to make mistakes
	Use jigsaw activities to distribute responsibility and encourage collaboration
	Question time, everyone asks a question at the end

This is completely raw data. I would like to make a thematic analysis at some stage to make more sense of the common threads and key ideas.

I just loved the sharing of practice, across a number of learning areas I might add.

It seems that we already have many parallels with the concept of 'Networked Learning'.

What are your thoughts? Does this spur any thoughts? Can you build on these ideas?

Feel free to add these in the comments below.

‘Online learning’/‘Networked learning’?

When you hear the words 'online learning' what kind of images does that conjure up for you? What kind of things does it make you think of? Perhaps correspondence learning, distance learning, remote learning come to mind? You may have read the headline recently ‘Rural schools may be forced into online classes as they struggle to hire teachers’ (RNZ,) suggesting that online learning is a poor second. You may have taken a correspondence course in the late nineties or early two thousands and have this as your mental model of online learning.

I would argue that in fact rather than being cold and remote and a poor second to face to face learning, online learning can be incredibly dynamic, innovative, interpersonal, and even exciting. However, and this is a big however, this takes very intentional learning design, a shift in thinking, and a shift in how we define online learning.

Let’s be clear about what is meant by this. First and foremost, we need to acknowledge that learning is a sociocultural endeavour (Vygotsky, 1978). Students are so inextricably networked in their social lives and in their online lives, it would seem counter-intuitive and perhaps a backwards step to ignore this within their online learning. I firmly believe that learning is not just about the content. If that is the sole focus of teaching, it misses the point. To quote a colleague of mine who I greatly respect ‘jamming through content does not equal greater learning, it just equals content covered’. Deep learning does not happen when we try to cram ideas into our students, and this is doubly true in the online setting. NLEC propose the term ‘Networked Learning’ (NLEC, 2020), this comes from a philosophy of connection. That is connections between learners, between learners and teachers, and between learners and learning resources NLEC (2020, p6). The learning community has to be at the heart of the matter. I really like the way that NLEC (2020, p3, para. 3) set out the points of difference for networked learning.

• An insistence on the importance of human relationships opens up questions about trust, power, identity, belonging, difference, affection, reciprocity, solidarity, commitment and time. 

• An interest in how technologies shape and are shaped by human activity, with a recognition that tools, artefacts and infrastructure are assembled or reconfigured in complex ways, provokes questions about the socio-material, affordances, instruments, access, appropriation, ownership, etc. 

• A commitment to collaborative inquiry and joint action in the face of shared challenges raises questions about knowledge, values and action, learning and doing, meaning-making, negotiation, shared projects and praxis, scale, scope, pace and duration and the capabilities needed to shape a world worth living in.

For those of you who teach for NetNZ, or maybe even have dabbled in Knowledge Building Communities this may be starting sound very familiar. For some of you this may be an aha moment. For me it affirms a pedagogy that has intuitively guided me for the past five years and will form the basis of my teaching inquiry heading into the future.

Within NetNZ community and connections have guide practice. NetNZ describes the advantages of being an e-learner amoungother things as ‘Access to a broad, flexible curriculum, anywhere, anytime; Learn to develop greater ownership of your learning; Connect and learn with students across the country’ (NetNZ, n.d.)

At a recent online teacher’s hui we spent some time unpacking some of these cornerstone ideas. I facilitated a group discussion around the connections and community side of things. It was really heartening to hear the kinds of things that teachers valued despite time restraints of online courses. As a whole teachers felt that developing relationships and connections between their learners to be highly important, ‘a foundation to learning’ and vital to establishing trust, safety and a sense of belonging within learners and in the teacher. The ability for students to share ideas, collaborate and work as a team, was highly valued, to the extent that teachers would devote considerable time to establish this at the start of the year and keep coming back to this each week, despite the time restraint of one or two Zoom calls a week. In general, this centred around people, getting to know students as whole people, allowing room to share on a human level, having a sense of humour, making space for student agency and ownership of the course and much, much, more. 1

Anecdotally students really respond to this kind of approach. My own course is highly collaborative and centres around a networked approach with students working as a community of art historian researchers. They are a team. The ideas are developed communally. Although this takes a lot of getting used to for many who are used to education in New Zealand as being highly individualised and somewhat competitive, this is soon valued by students. I have had students make comments like ‘I felt like I was a part of the class’, ‘I enjoyed being able to bounce my ideas off of fellow students’, 'my ideas were valued', the teacher is interested in all perspectives'. 

It is worth noting that within this approach, although the learners within the community are absolutely central, the teacher is an essential component. They enable and develop the kind of learning environment where students are able to connect. With each other, with their own learning, with the larger concepts in the course. This all takes very strategic and subtle design, which would be worthwhile unpacking on its' own.

1.  The ideas teachers come up with about why connections and community were so important and strategies they used to develop these are too numerous to mention here and will be posted separately.

References

Gerritson J.  (2020, December 07). Rural schools may be forced into online classes as they struggle to hire teachers, originally published by RNZ republished with permission on Stuff.co.nz. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/300176726/rural-schools-may-be-forced-into-online-classes-as-they-struggle-to-hire-teachers

Networked Learning Editorial Collective (NLEC). Networked Learning: Inviting Redefinition. Postdigit Sci Educ (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00167-8

NetNZ. (n.d.). Why NetNZ? Retrieved December 09, 2020, from http://www.netnz.org/why-netnz-2/

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Reflecting against inquiry goal: 'To develop reflective capabilities in visual art students'.

I can't believe how quickly a term has just flown by. I haven't worked on this goal as much as I would have liked to, as during the lockdown to an extent it was just about making learning work for the situation we were in, inquiry to an extent got pushed to the side.

However, what I have discovered is that my students can reflect well on their work, the important thing is a well-worded template or prompt that asks students to justify their work. If they are saying that their work was successful, they need to say why this was.

They also need to have a good understanding of our learning objectives - in short, where are we headed. When students understood what I wanted them to be doing (big picture wise) their reflections were deeper and more meaningful. For some students who think a bit more deeply it actually helped to have an authentic text to draw upon in their reflections. I recently experimented with giving students a text 'what makes a good artwork'. This was an interesting exercise but a bit rushed as this was at the end of time we were pushing to get artworks finished in time. Also I would need to search for a range of texts potentially so that this task was more accessible for different levels. 

Reflecting against inquiry goals: 'To develop reflective capabilities in visual art students' & 'To use a knowledge building approach to engage online learners'

At the moment I am working on developing template that give students prompts for reflection, as I found students wrote well about their work when there were scaffolds around the reflection to guide them.
I think this is necessary, it is quite a skill to reflect about your thinking or your progress.
I know that I need guiding questions for inquiry.  My entire Master's thesis question and methodology set out the plan for my inquiry and gave me a set of criteria to reflect against. This took a large chunk of time and stress to develop and I am an educated adult.
I think inquiry and reflection need to be taught and supported. If I throw my students into an inquiry with no/little guidance, this is like putting a kid on a bike for the first time with no training wheels. They are going to fall over.

Ultimately I want my students to have epistemic agency - but there is a lot of learning and development to get to that stage. This is a goal that will sit over multiple years of inquiry.

Relecting on my experience of teaching during Covid-19

I've had a bit of time to reflect on the impact of teaching during the age of Covid-19

Positives:
Some students have found this time to be really empowering. They have had the flexibility to organise their learning in a way that suits them and the support that they need to support this - through weekly video meets and also through one to one.

Some have struggled with the whole thing, but I feel with those who are struggling it is an amplification of issues/struggles they might have had face to face. It's important to point out that these students have still had support via one to one video calls which has helped them to move forwards a bit. I guess a positive is that it is easier to organise a quick video call after school as I have far fewer meetings and it is really easy and natural at the moment to set up a quick call.

And then there were some students who really surprised me in the way that they flourished during this time. Some of these students had struggled in the traditional face to face environment, but have been on top of their learning every step of the way during covid-19. Every class, every drop in tutorial, every check point - they were there.

The learning is super visible. I thought that I was doing a good job of making the learning accessible to student previously, but really there was a lot that happened face to face that wasn't recorded in any form. I have been super deliberate with the way that I organise the learning sequences and tried to make examples for each thing I am asking students to to do. I have been making far more rewindable clips. If I am asking students to do something I want something that they can go back to again and again for guidance.

It has also been easier for students to ask questions and share with me what they are working on outside of our scheduled times. This has come in a variety of means: google forms to take the temperature of students' mood and needs, padlets to ask questions, padlets to share work. This has also been quite spontaneous - it is very easy for students to ask a quick question about their work using google chat, get a quick reply, and carry on with their work with confidence.

Learning and surprises:
In my online class, everything we do is centered around community and connections. I  have been working on this with my WHS classes online. Juniors and Middle School responded really well to this. Many of them are really missing their friends and missing school in general. They lapped up the chance to share how they were going at home, to show off their work and just connect with other humans.

Senior students were a different kettle of fish. Not all, but a number of them were anxious about interacting in class, which I had not been expecting given that they all know each other and have been to school together for several years. Some wouldn't turn their cameras or microphones on. Sigh. Part of this was just the personalities in the class and part of it was that this was a cohort that started at WHS before we were fully immersed in the learn-create-share pedagogy of Toki Pounamu. It is a little bit telling that they were so apprehensive about sharing.

However, this led me to think about how I could best use the time with them. They are for the most part really diligent, hard working kids. What was successful was to organise my calls with them in a different way. I have started doing the following in our weekly calls: Checking in on how we are doing as humans (maybe a good thing and a tricky/challenging thing), sharing a quick presentation of anything I want the whole class to know about or be focusing on, then in a google doc students book 5-10 minutes to converse with me about their work. Students have really bought into this and taken it really seriously. It is keeping them accountable and giving them timely support. I'm thinking about how I can transfer the learning from this back into the face to face context. Perhaps I could do a google form at the start of the week to see how students are with their work. Then triage who needs to talk to me first and have a couple of periods set up purely for consulting with students about their art.

I'm also thinking that I also need to look at my learning design and devise some subtle, gentle ways to get students to share their work more often, in a way that doesn't make them feel too whakamā. I am trying to develop a visual arts community, not visual arts student silos.


And of course there are things that I am looking forward to when I get back to the classroom .My printmakers have been having a tough time of it for instance without their press. Juniors and middle school classes have been hard work with students having variable and often limited supplies at home.

Teaching art in the age of online learning

My previous reflection had been musing on the possibility of working from home should the covid-19 situation escalate.

This is now a reality.

While I am still committed to developing reflective capabilities in my WHS students,

I have been thinking a lot about how to keep everything manageable.

For my juniors

I think it will be important to keep the teaching and learning simple, as not to overwhelm them.

There is a lot that is changing for students right now, adapting to it all takes up energy and cognitive space.

Now is not the time to be throwing lots of new technology and tools at them.

I have also been thinking about how I can teach art to students who have very limited resources available at home.

I think this will be the time to leverage on what they do have.

We are lucky enough that our students have chromebook and a webcam.

My plan is to use this technology that the students (mostly) have at their fingertips for their learning.

This can be quick and relatively low-tech. e.g.

• Make a colour wheel with things you have around the house and garden and photograph it,
• An alphabet challenge find shapes that look like letters and see how far you can get through the alphabet - photograph these and post them to our class padlet.
• Make a flipbook on a google slide.
• Set up a scene for a photo that creates forced perspective and see who can create the wackiest scene.

For middle school

I have been thinking about how to balance the limited art resources that they may or may not have at home with them,

with the wet and dry media skills I am trying to develop in them to prepare them for level 6 of the visual art curriculum.

This has involved really going back to basics and thinking what can be done with pencil, pen and paper, and possibly what might be lying around in the pantry.

I am really, really grateful that I had the foresight to purchase some art making kits from Joe at HomePrint in Fielding.

This was initially for me to get through some stressful times, but has turned out to be quite fruitful for coming up with ideas for middle school art (and possibly even year 11, if the student hadn't retrieved their art kit from school in the days leading up to the lockdown).

A really simple, yet effective idea is cutting a paper stencil, taping this to another sheet of paper and drawing into the negative space.

Students could use this technique to zen doodle and de-stress or share with the class what is happening in their bubble.

Another neat idea I pinched from a colleague of mine was a food colouring and drawing exercise. All students will need is paper, something to wet the page with, a few drops of food colouring, and something to draw into it with once the food colouring has dried.

The first step would be to wet their page. If they have a brush, this is great, otherwise they need to find some other way of wetting their page so that they have a regular shape on it (perhaps over a sink, hold a piece of paper firmly over a mug of water. Quickly flip it over so that the paper is wet in a circle shape and then back up the right way). Then while the page is still wet, drop a few droplets of food colouring onto the damp paper. The food colouring will mostly just stick to the wet page.

Then leave the page to dry (with something heavy at either end of the page to stop it from curling up).

When the page is dry, doodle into the spaces where there is less colouring. This could be a zen-tangle and quite abstract, or it could be a more organised doodle landscape. For an extra challenge try drawing something you can see in your bubble into the artwork.

(acknowledgement given to M Timutimu, who made these artworks)

For my senior students, it has been a good opportunity to put together some art history tasks that relate to their portfolio work, as many have their art kits but are needing to ration what they do have.

Students get extra literacy credits in a time where their teachers might be pushed to get them through their useful programme of learning and I have come to realise how practical and useful the art history standards can be for visual art students. Win, win.

I'm not going to lie. It has been a lot of work to tailor the art history standards to all the different levels and fields that I teach and their interests.

This was my life last week. I feel like it will be really beneficial in the long run though.

I've also had to rethink my tried and tested painting & printmaking programme for level one students. It's a bit hard to make this happen when there is no printmaking press! Fortunately at level one, students can do printmaking, painting, sculpture, photography or design - they are assessed against general visual art making principles. It really has been a case of trying to put myself in my students' shoes and thinking, what can I do given the resources that I have at hand.

Time will tell, the impact that this has on students' learning.

Setting the course for my 2020 inquiry journey

Teacher inquiry is a funny thing isn't it. For many teachers it is the thing that they love to hate, an exercise in compliance.

But for me I think I would be reflecting on my teaching whether it were a part of my appraisal or not. Since undertaking a Master's study in 2018 I see the value of practitioner led inquiry. I think that is the key. Practitioner led. If I were to be told what my goals were, or have parameters placed around what my goals could and couldn't be, I would quickly rebel.

For me inquiry needs to be timely and relevant. It needs to address authentic issues within my context, not create layers of extra work and bureaucracy.

Earlier in the year I set my professional inquiry goals, thinking back to last years' inquiry and the needs identified.

For my face to face class, I decided that it was important to develop reflective capabilities in my junior and middle school students, and as I reflect on this goal amid schools put together plans for how they might deal with covid-19 should it develop in our community, it seems more relevant than ever. 

If my students aren't able to be in class, or if indeed the school is unable to be open physically, I need to ensure that my students are able to continue engage with their learning and take ownership of their learning, without their teacher in their faces telling them what to do.

For my online class, my goal is to use a knowledge building approach to engage online learners. This has the potential to be quite a challenging goal, if students join my online class for a period of time while they are unable to access their face to face classes. This is a possibility if their school isn't equipped to deliver curriculum digitally and engage with their students by distance. I would have to think quite carefully about how I manage this, as there is a whole lot that I weave into the background of my online class to ensure that students are connected as a community and engaging with each other in and out of our scheduled VC time. Creating a safe space to work as a class, takes a fair bit of intentional learning design.

I also think that there is a great deal of potential to model and share quite innovative practice to a wider 'audience', there is potential for online teachers to be leaders in terms of pedagogy, here.