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.