Tag: Reflections

Workshop 2 – Reflection

Belonging can be a contentious term when it comes to online learning. What are students belonging to? Who dictates this? What happens if individuals don’t want to ‘belong’? It’s been an area that has come up many times in my work as a learning designer (especially post-pandemic) and a main reason I chose the SPARK article ‘Home sweet home achieving belonging and engagement‘ by Stacey Ross and Lee Leewis.

I saw Stacey and Lee present this paper as a talk during the Presence and Belonging in Digital Education Conference in 2021. Stacey opened the session by playing an afro-beats track whilst people were joining the Teams meeting. This was an insight into Stacey’s theory of treating online spaces as extensions of ‘home’ as opposed to ‘non-places, or spaces where individuals feel lonely and disconnected’ (White, 2021).

What do we mean by belonging?

Love and belonging, positioned as the third level in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, are essential for human potential. Carol Goodenow offers a concise definition within an educational framework:

“Being accepted, valued, included, and encouraged by others (teachers and peers) in the academic classroom and of feeling oneself to be an important part of the life and activity of the class (…) it also involves support and respect for personal autonomy and for the student as an individual”

Carol Goodenow, 1993

Creating a sense of belonging in online spaces?

Stacey created a Miro board for her unit. She designated student-only areas on the board, giving them a sense of autonomy over the space and nurturing feelings of ownership and connection.

We tend to identify notions of ‘home’ as places where we leave our physical possessions knowing that they will be there when we return. In the online environment, or the ‘non-place’, possessions or assets are not permanent. Once we leave a Teams meeting, you can never truly ‘go back.’ To counter this feeling of impermanence, Stacey kept the Miro board open for the entirety of the unit. She let students decide what areas they wanted to explore within the unit, which in turn led to a sense of ‘co-creation…(w)e co-create the board, the space, and each lesson together.’ (Ross and Leewis, 2022).

Stacey and Lee reflected on the relationships within the virtual learning space, including teacher-student, student-student, and student-space connections (adapting Garrison’s Community of Inquiry model). From this, they proposed a new model with three key goals: connection, ownership, and co-creation.

The issue with belonging

Students who feel a sense of community and belonging are more engaged and likely to complete their studies. Felten and Westen (2021), however, suggest ‘mattering’ as a more nuanced concept for belonging, especially for marginalised individuals who are historically disempowered and who might feel that belonging is beyond their reach.

We should ensure that students feel as though they matter as individuals within the context of the group, thus creating an environment where they feel empowered as owners, connected, and able to co-create. If students feel that they matter, they might start to feel increased feelings of belonging as a result of them being acknowledged for who they are, rather than being expected to force themselves to fit into a specific group. Curious to know what others may think!

(546 words)

References

Felten, P. and Weston, H. (2021) Is ‘mattering’ a more helpful way of thinking about student belonging at university? Edinburgh: Media Hopper Create, The University of Edinburgh. Available at: https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/1_xv45vrlp (Accessed: 20 January 2024)

Goodenow, C. (1993) ‘Classroom Belonging among Early Adolescent Students’, The Journal of Early Adolescence, 13(1), pp. 21–43. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0272431693013001002.

Leewis, L., & Ross, S. L. (2022) Home sweet home: Achieving belonging and engagement in online learning spaces. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, 5(1), 71–81.

Thijm, J. (2023) ‘Mattering vs belonging and the impact of academic advisors: online professional part-time students – a case study’, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education [Preprint], (29). Available at: https://doi.org/10.47408/jldhe.vi29.1091.

Thomas, L., Herbert, J. and Teras, M. (2014) ‘A sense of belonging to enhance participation, success and retention in online programs’, The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, 5(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5204/intjfyhe.v5i2.233.

White, D. (2021) ‘Pedagogy, Presence and Placemaking: a learning-as-becoming model of education.’, David White, 17 May. Available at: https://daveowhite.com/learning-as-becoming/ (Accessed: 20 January 2024).

_{Image credit: Stacey Leigh Ross}

Workshop 1 – Reflection

An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice

It’s not the most encouraging start when you read the title of an article and you only understand half of it. Remembering the advice given on Moodle, however, I launched ChatGPT and prompted it to explain the title to me like I was a second-year undergraduate fine art student at UAL.

The article

The article is a celebration of voices, a narrative blend of auto-ethnographic accounts and diverse stories from four female artists that weave together to create a ‘threadscape’ (Flood 2014) that goes beyond one individual narrative. The article highlights the significance of integrating personal narratives into arts education. It advocates for a pedagogic approach that values diversity in storytelling and identity exploration through various means such as reflection, storytelling, and community building.

Creating in isolation

There were parallels drawn between the historical isolation of women in their creative spaces and the contemporary challenge of creating in isolation and learning not to ‘succumb to isolation’ (Grumet, 1988).

The visibility of creating and documenting creative work is highlighted as essential, drawing attention to the interconnectedness of personal narratives and the need to share these stories to break the chains of isolation. Isolation, in the context of online learning, provokes reflection as it is more nuanced than the simple exchange of ‘expressing our thoughts and feelings to someone else.’ Being seen is also a key part of creating this ‘métissage’ yet we know that in an online learning environment, ‘the facilitator may never actually “see” any of the students’ (Gillet-Swan, 2017).

The challenge in online spaces is twofold: ensuring students feel and are seen. Strategies to overcome this could include ‘echolocating the self’ in a digital environment, aiming to establish presence and community despite physical absence. Sometimes it can feel as though there isn’t anyone else out there, at least in the liminal space of an online course.

Becoming through entanglement

The concept of becoming through entanglement resonated deeply in the context of the first TPP workshop. We were all strangers, but at the end it felt that we had come together to create new collective understandings, for instance on what social justice meant to us.

The postcard activity allowed us to share stories about ourselves, demonstrating the collaborative intertwining of stories. We celebrated the particularity of individuals while weaving a ‘threadscape’ of shared experiences as UAL staff.

Sharing lived experiences, memories, and conflicts of practice, can help to deepen our understanding, learn more about ourselves and open new spaces for teaching and learning. How we might share and ‘entangle’ these experiences remains an area to explore, particularly in the online space where sharing work is not always as straightforward as it might be in-person.

Conclusion

Making work visible is crucial, especially online. Strategies for enhancing visibility include creating informal interaction opportunities, fostering ‘safe spaces,’ and emphasising personalisation. These efforts aim to reduce isolation and enrich the educational experience by building a supportive and engaging online community.

By sharing stories and making work visible, individuals contribute to a ‘threadscape’ enriching pedagogic practices and reducing the inherent isolation that is can be of the creative process.

(545 words)

References

Flood, A. (2014) Common threads: a discursive text narrating ideas of memory and artistic identity. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Gillett-Swan, J. (2017) ‘The Challenges of Online Learning: Supporting and Engaging the Isolated Learner’, Journal of Learning Design, 10(1), p. 20. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5204/jld.v9i3.293.

Grumet, M. ( 1988), Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching, Amherst, MA:: University of Massachusetts Press;, http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.27-0431.

Osler, T. et al. (2019) ‘An a/r/tographic métissage: Storying the self as pedagogic practice’, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, 12(1-2), pp. 109–129. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/jwcp.12.1-2.109_1.

_{Photo by Clément Falize on Unsplash}