Creating an online Community

After an extremely intense autumn term, when the plans I had started drafting before the students started were immediately sidelined due to more urgent issues, I have in these last couple of months since the start of the spring term started to find and take time to focus on this important matter again. A couple of things below have been recently mentioned in a previous blog post. However, there have been some updates to events and I felt the need to summarise all my thoughts and efforts here, followed by making connections to texts read.

I have organised themed Community sessions during Thursday lunchtime. Here we have had BA2 students speaking to and sharing work and experiences with BA1, run an interactive colour session where we created a collaborative colour board and a London Fashion Week focused session (timed with the students needing to start their market research) where we discussed favourite collections / designers / videos. Playing music proved to be a game changer, something which I adapted into a taught session last week – explained later in this post.

I’ve also started a Wednesday morning half hour drop-in session where students are invited to ‘Pop in to say hello, ask questions, or just let me know how you’re getting on‘. Last week, although I only had three students out of about 90, we had a fantastic session. The students who attended had never met each other before. I managed to get everyone to come on camera and we just chatted for a while. I was there to mediate between the students, introducing themselves to each other and bringing up topics that they all could related to. My favourite moment was when one student who lived in Budapest first of all educated the others on what country that’s in 😉 and then explained a bit about the political issues in Hungary, such as the government being anti LGBT communities. Although the attendance was low, I believe it is thanks to this that we were able to have such an intimate discussion where students felt comfortable to keep cameras on (one girl was sat on her bed wearing a leopard print dressing gown). I felt that our meeting enhanced the feeling of belonging and connection between these students.

It has also been time for Pastoral Tutorials for all students. This term we held these in small groups students whom I have met for one hour time slots. Over the last two weeks I have met with ten of these groups. Every session has been different due to the range of dynamics that is found in every group. (As well as, perhaps, time of day, my current headspace etc.) I wrote in my previous post about the successful sessions with the Print students and how some started to connect for perhaps the first time since starting the course. This was followed by a week of meeting Embrodiery students. Here, after a successful end of session with cameras on with the printers, I encouraged students to turn cameras on from the start. I noticed that I just took one person to be brave and switch theirs on, and the rest would soon follow. There was one exceptions to this, which was a larger group of 7-8 students who also happened to be many of the less confident / engaged ones. Overall, I would say that a group of up to 4 students worked well and gave way to an equal dialogue, but any more meant some remained quiet and tried to stay ‘hidden’.

My final example is related to the featured image I have used for this blog post. Last Friday I was in a particularly good mood when teaching print workshops – one group in the morning and one in the afternoon. After reflections on the positive engagements described above as well as recent student feedback on online sessions and how they much prefer interactive sessions, I used this to inspire my lesson. After a presentation on research, I introduced an interactive ‘photo challenge’ where students were asked to get up and photograph pattern in their everyday surroundings. During this time I asked for music requests, which I played on my Alexa. The activity had an educational purpose whilst being fun and interactive as well as slightly connected, as all BA1 students were sharing their work on the same Padlet and I commented whilst sharing my screen. My favourite moment, however, was during the afternoon session when about half way through the lesson (one hour in) I have a spontaneous idea to share the whiteboard and ask students to create a shared drawing whilst I play some music. One student (and the subconsciously biased person in me I will admit was surprised to learn she know this artist) suggested Fast Car by Tracy Chapman. I was very impressed and she got lots of praise for her suggestion. After this we had Dancing Queen by Abba – where I was jokingly equally pleased because I’m Swedish, but told them I will not be dancing for them.

To summarise these experiences I will say that I have learned a lot from taking time to experiment with different approaches and teaching techniques whilst listening to student feedback on what they enjoy the most, such as the interactive sessions. In the article ‘The Art of Loving in the Classroom‘, the author Allan Patience argues that “the fad for replacing real teachers with technology can only result in an increasingly dehumanised pedagogy and the vandalising of the very art of teaching as a form of loving“. He may have a point, but teaching resources and technology has come a long was since 2008 when this article was written – when a worldwide pandemic and lockdowns would have been many been seen as a dystopian fantasy. We have since started to learn to adapt, and although I am not in any way suggesting we no longer have a need for physical interactions – of course we do – I will continue to look for ways to make those digital classrooms feel a little bit more personal, interactive and fun. I would thereby argue that there is indeed space to build Dramatic Friendships online.