Community

So I’m back from a few days away where I enjoyed nature and dipped my toes into a lake. It was an important bit of space that allowed me to think through some upcoming events and writing projects that I am working on. I’m finally at a spot where I’m not trying to complete 3 projects at once so that bit of distance was a good demarcation point for the middle summer times leading into fall course prep and semester start.

I read three books over the past two days and they were all very much centred (at least for me) about community and how we find and define our community. The etymology of community is from the Old French for “common people” and for certain readers that phrase will right away bring up that Pulp song (no captions on video sadly). But there is something to this. Community is about finding our commonness, where we intersect with others in our interests and positionality. A lot of the discussions on Twitter and social media in general lately have been about building community and for finding that commonality as humans and members of society. As a result there are many who have been working hard to reinforce boundaries that would erase communality.

Within pedagogical discourse around remote learning and teaching, there is much that has been discussed around the importance and at times the difficulties of building and finding community in remote educational spaces. Faculty often ask how to build and sustain a sense of class community, outside of discussion posts that don’t often work as well as they should if they are not phrased or positioned with authentic engagement in mind. Students are for the most part looking for the community online that they have lost by not being in class face-to-face or in residence or even as part of a sports team or campus group. Instructors are looking for ways to have that same sort of community feel to their courses that is found in small breakout groups or think, pair, shares, or even upper year seminar spaces. Community seems to be the number one thing guiding so many discussions we are having right now, and yet there is no easy answer- that is because there was no easy answer before COVID either.

Finding one’s community and building one’s community is a process. It isn’t a plug and play endeavour. I read queer novels and short stories because I am looking for my community where ever I can right now. There is a gap in how we connect because of the pandemic and I am trying to fill that gap with the words of others from my community. There is something very soothing sometimes about that community connection through language and words. Reading or hearing a story about someone from our community is a memory trigger that reinforces positionionality, and makes us feel, if only slightly, less alone. This is also what we need to be striving for in our educational spaces. Whether remotely, hybrid, or face-to-face, community is a strong part of the learning process. It is integral to a constructivist pedagogical framework, and to many other theories of learning. 

It was only in having the space to reflect yesterday that I realized that the books I was reading recently were a way to fill in the gaps in community that I have been feeling. It was a very different end of June than usual and end of June is always either a time where you find community or lament your lack of community. The way I spent Dyke Day this year reinforced how community can be found in many places, you just need to know where to look.  The words that you are reading, and yes also arguably more importantly the words that you are writing, are the foundation to those communities. Whether that be fiction, poetry, or non-fiction as the course content and concepts you are relaying to learners, words have a real power to tie and build community that is often forgotten.

So as we start another week in pandemic pedagogy land, may now is a good time to reflect on the words you read and the words you write, and how you are either creating community or building barriers and boundaries with your words.