Introduction
In our recent ‘Building Communities’ series, Teaching Matters was delighted to feature eight blog posts that showcased what colleagues across the University are doing to enhance community building practice. As part of a sector-wide effort to enrich student experience, the current Enhancement Theme - Resilient Learning Communities - focuses on adapting to the evolving needs and values of an increasingly diverse student body in a rapidly changing world. In their introductory blog post, Building Community PhD Interns Yuemiao Ma and Bradley Sharples highlight the importance of fostering a sense of community and belonging at the University – communities provide an anchor for students, and are central to student development, wellbeing, and support. This series saw colleagues reflect on their creative undertakings to build communities within their Colleges and beyond, sharing ‘what works’, and what we can do to move forward.
In this newsletter, you'll find five key insights into how we can successfully build communities in HE, followed by our regular features: Collegiate Commentary, In case you missed it (ICYMI), and Coming soon at Teaching Matters! If you'd like to keep up with Teaching Matters, sign up to our Monthly Newsletter Mailing List.
Five key insights to engage successfully in ‘Building Communities’
Key Insight 1: Curate creative online communities
The pandemic has challenged us to rethink the ways that we interact with others. This was especially critical in a University environment, where connection and collaboration are key to building a community of learners.
Entering into the 20/21 academic year, students and staff alike stepped into the relatively unfamiliar world of virtual learning and teaching. Rising to the challenge, Dr Simone Dimartino, Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering, led Engineering Principles 1 (EP1), a flagship course that was redesigned to meet the vision of a major Curriculum Renewal effort at the School of Engineering. Students took on the role of ‘engineers in the making’ and collaborated with peers to complete four different group projects. Students also made use of online discussion boards to work with peers to brainstorm ideas, communicate challenges, and seek solutions.
Borislava Georgieva and Azwa Iman, two students who took the course, reflect:
[…] we were all able to truly learn the importance of teamwork and develop not only hard-core skills but also important, soft-core skills such as project planning, communication and writing, but also becoming independent learners embedded into a wider virtual community.
See the final group videos published in the Engineering 1 Media Hopper Replay channel.
Across at the Usher Institute, Digital Education Advisor Chris Sheridan reflects on her experience setting up a Summer School to help induct new and existing students into the Family Medicine Programme community. From which online platform to use, to how to plan a jam-packed but relaxed day of activities, Chris shares her tried and tested formula for a successful Summer School.
At the Moray House School of Education and Sport (MHSES), Sam Fawkner, Emily Birtles, and Giulia Pinton introduce current initiatives to achieve a whole School community. Setting out to build a single, coordinated approach to sharing information with students, the Student SharePoint and bi-weekly student round-up were established. These continue to be expertly curated and updated, to share with students opportunities to connect with each other and the School, as well as the wide range of wellbeing support and resources available to them.
Key Insight 2: Foster meaningful connections
With the ease of Covid-19 restrictions and life returning somewhat to ‘normality’, it is an opportune time to evaluate what we can do to foster meaningful interactions and inclusive communities, especially for isolated student groups.
Shian Holt, Head of Student Support & Enhancement in the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences (PPLS), highlights the sense of loneliness that many research students face:
“As a group, research students were profoundly affected by the lock downs because they were less likely to be living in larger groups. Many were living in small apartments, with no space to set up a separate office or work space, and their research necessitated lab or research participant work that could not be simply moved online. Pre-pandemic, the very nature of their research lives had already reduced their social contact, and this effect was only sharpened during the lockdowns.”
In light of this, colleagues at PPLS have introduced several initiatives to build a PhD student community, including coaching services for academic success and wellbeing, which invites students to share and reflect on current progress with their studies or life plans, and talk about ways forward.
Key Insight 3: Student-informed, student-led
The extra isolation of the pandemic years has fuelled a momentum among students to recover a sense of community. Across Schools, students have led community initiatives, and worked together with staff to champion events based on shared vision and interests.
The MHSES have collaborated with students to develop a range of community events. These include the Student Practice Worth Sharing programme, where students and staff come together to discuss collaboratively and share experiences. The Feelings Club provides a space for students to chat about challenges and triumphs they experience, as well as hosts regular mindfulness sessions. The Community Champions team, formed by student champions from across the School, work with staff and students to promote School initiatives, create relatable social media content, organise community events, and more.
Similar work is underway at PPLS, where PhD student-led community initiatives have been recognised in multiple award nominations. In CommuniTEA, students meet regularly to discuss topics over coffee and cake. Students have also widened their existing academic networks to include all research students, rather than just their subject area.
Key Insight 4: Establish Peer Support schemes
Peer Support Schemes have been a key source of support for new students, and an excellent way for more established students to share their knowledge and experience. In his post, Dr Neil Speirs, Widening Participation Manager, reflects on twenty years of peer support. Peer mentoring is built on relationships of solidarity, which enables staff, mentors, and mentees to come together in a forum of mutual exchange.
In developing campus relationships that matter, students form connections and networks of solidarity that help them understand how to navigate the ‘rules’ of the campus. Over the course of the oldest and longest running peer support project at the University, almost 4000 students have been working together for each other, developing fellowship and solidarity in community. With dozens of active Peer Support Schemes across Schools, the ‘security, opportunity and joy’ of peer-mentoring continues to inspire students today.
“The peer-mentoring project rejects the coldness that can be found on campus. The ‘distant aloofness’, that one student talked to me about a few years ago, fractures any possibility of connectedness let alone belonging. The essence of our project is simply about caring about others; it is warm, humanising and full of Freire’s pedagogy of hope (Freire, 2021).”
Key Insight 5: Consider the future of Building Communities
What does the future hold for building communities practice?
In her role as Building Community PhD Intern, Yuemiao Ma worked with PhD research students to investigate the landscape of community building and develop a sense of 'what works'. One key message that emerged is that, although there is a lot happening at the University, sometimes outstanding work goes unrecognised due to lack of effective communication. There is a need for more support from staff on student projects (including funding and recognition), and stronger relationships to increase students’ sense of community and belonging. Many students also have a desire to attend seminars and training sessions beyond their own research area on an informal basis. To that end, the Students’ Association and Doctoral College hosted PGR Pizza talks over summer 2022, which included a series of 15-minute presentations on wide-ranging topics.
As part of his role as Building Community PhD Intern, Bradley Sharples developed a theory of change model to conceptualise his work. The proposed model traces the root causes that impact the community building ‘needs’ at the University:
“In brief, the model traces the root causes that impact the community building ‘needs’ at the University. These then feed into some activities and projects occurring at the University, which then translate into outcomes organised by timescale. It also includes the various tools that we can use to measure community building, from the student representative handover document, to student surveys, to the student panel. We can use this model to record, justify, and guide community building at the University.”
Collegiate Commentary
with Professor Jenny Marie, Head of Academic & Learning Enhancement at the University of Greenwich
While Teaching Matters primarily showcases University of Edinburgh teaching and learning practice, our core values of collegiality and support extend beyond our institution, inviting a wider, international community to engage in Teaching Matters. In this feature, we ask colleagues from other Universities to provide a short commentary on ‘Five things...’, and share their own learning and teaching resource or output, which we can learn from.
Jenny's commentary on 'Five key insights to engage successfully in ‘Building communities’'
The Coronavirus pandemic has refocused attention on community building in Higher Education, for student and staff wellbeing and for student learning. At my institution, the University of Greenwich, social isolation was cited by a significant number of students as the most challenging aspect of blended learning during the pandemic. I also heard many staff talking about the difficulty of teaching to circles in boxes and how it had taken the enjoyment out of teaching. If we want to ensure that our students get the most out of their time at university, and that staff regain their love of teaching, we need to rebuild and strengthen inclusive learning communities: these key insights provide great ideas about how to do so.
Building communities online is not straightforward – but with hybrid working becoming more normal, our students need to learn how to collaborate and work together online. The use of online discussion boards as learning resources, as occurred in Dr Simone Dimartino’s Engineering Principles 1, has added another way for students to engage with their learning and to do so in a way that allows for the social construction of knowledge with their peers. In a multi-institutional collaborative project on inclusive assessment, the project team identified meaningful communication as a key attribute of inclusivity, with the need to use different levels and modes of communication to ensure information is distributed to all students. This echoes the work of Sam Fawkner, Emily Birtles, and Giulia Pinton at the Moray House School of Education and Sport in building inclusive communities.
In fostering meaningful connections, we can ensure that all students know they matter, whether they are PhD students like those at the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences, or students that universities have traditionally found it harder to cater for, perhaps because they are in a liminal space like PGT students or spend less time on campus as part-time or commuter students. At Greenwich, my colleague Louise Owusu-Kwarteng has collated anthologies of sociology students’ autobiographies to illustrate how their lived experiences relate to social and political structures and the intersections between them. This enables students to draw on their backgrounds to relate to the subject and enables meaningful connections to be built between Louise, the students, and each other.
Student-led initiatives are particularly powerful for building communities. Over the years, I’ve seen students lead writing retreats and student conferences, like those funded by the Student Staff Initiative Fund. A good example at Greenwich is a student and staff female science group formed during the Coronavirus pandemic, where the issues of being a woman in the field and working during the pandemic are discussed. As Yuemiao Ma highlights in the thoughts for the future, these initiatives often need staff support in order to be sustained, and working together on them provides a great opportunity to build stronger student-staff relationships and students’ engagement with the institution.
Peer support is also key, and whether our students have access to peer support schemes or not, teachers may want to reflect on how they encourage student-student support as well as encourage students to reach out for the staff support that’s available. For example, asking students to identify strengths they can use to support others both helps develop students’ self-efficacy and supports peer learning.
Ultimately, though, Bradley Sharples is right – if we want to take the building of inclusive communities seriously, we need to develop theories of change. Why would we expect, and how, will initiatives lead to communities being built, as opposed to the short-term and more limited immediate outcomes of the work?
About: Prof. Jenny Marie is Head of Academic & Learning Enhancement at the University of Greenwich, where she works to enhance education across the institution. She is also currently chair of the University Alliance PVC Learning and Teaching Network. In her role at Greenwich, she has co-developed the institution’s Student Success sub-strategy and is co-leading its implementation. She is also developing her team to provide support to staff in new areas, such as technology-enhanced learning and educational leadership. Throughout the pandemic she worked with the Student Union to better understand students’ experiences and needs. She has conducted research as part of a QAA-funded collaborative project on inclusive assessment, which was based on pandemic experiences. She has a long-term interest in student partnership, having previously led UCL’s student partnership scheme. She tweets at @JennyAMarie.
In case you missed it (ICYMI)
Learning & Teaching Conference 2022
Conference presentation recordings are now available to view on the Conference website, including poster presentations and keynote talks.
Edinburgh University Students' Association Teaching Awards 2022
In May, Teaching Matters ran a short 'Hot Topic' series on the Students’ Association Student-Led Teaching Awards 2022, which included a highlight on the online ceremony and the Teaching Awards category: ‘Outstanding Innovation in Digital Teaching’. Dialogues between nominees are captured in two podcast episodes:
Don't forget to read our recent extra posts:
- Where are you from? Raising awareness of Third Culture Students in Higher Education, by Dr Laura Cariola and Tamara Lai.
- Consent Collective TV: Carrying on the conversations, by Cynthia Ellis
Check out the call for Student Partnership Agreement proposals - funding is available for up to £1000 for projects that involve meaningful collaboration between University of Edinburgh staff and students.
Have a look at the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme (PTAS), which provides funding to support learning and teaching enhancement. Submissions for funding deadline: 6 October 2022. If you are developing a bid for funding, you may find the following workshop helpful to attend: Practical Strategies for... Applying for Principal's Teaching Award Scheme - Wednesday 7th September 2022, 12:00 - 13:00.
Coming soon at Teaching Matters
Upcoming blog themes
September & October Hot Topic: Student Partnership Agreement 2022: Project outcomes
September & October L&T Enhancement Theme: Embedding employability into the curriculum
Recent podcast series: Uncovering Uncover
- Episode 1: Uncovering UNCOVER (7 mins)
- Episode 2: Supporting staff and students through UNCOVER (26 mins)
- Episode 3: UNCOVERing good evidence reviews (33 mins)
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Credits:
Created with images by hopsalka - "Silhouettes of people relaxing at the National Monument of Scotland on Calton Hill in Edinburgh at sunset" • Günter Albers - "blue sky with sun" • Pawel Pajor - "Panoramic view of Canary wharf viewed from Greenwich park in London. England" With thanks to Melanie Grandidge for her icon artwork design.