On occasion, I have had one of those classes where there is just one personality in the room who seems to bring the group together. It is a rare and beautiful phenomenon to behold. For those students who are especially good at it, they can somehow create a mood or atmosphere within the room just by being a willing and interested participant in the activities and then by some wonderful sense of energy can bring along most of the class with them.
Those students are exceptional and they truly do make the learning experience seem much more effortless. Aside from the personality of that individual, the truly significant factor is the willingness of the group to buy-in to the class or to participate and engage. A particularly skilled teacher can also have this effect.
The truth is that creating a sense of community within a class is pretty difficult. There are so many different variables, many of which are beyond our control. Sometimes, it is a matter of personality combinations within a classroom. Sometimes it’s the time of day, or even the design or layout of the actual space.
Nevertheless, creating community is pretty foundational to learning-- especially for those who have not had a lot of academic success in the past. It’s part of the social aspect of learning. In fact, one of the downfalls of the factory model of education is that it treats the student as an individual component being processed through the system that largely treats everyone the same. But educational research, specifically within the field of social constructivism, offers a much different model of learning. Essentially, social constructivism promotes the idea that first, people learn best when they do so within communities, and second, that people learn better when they have the opportunity to construct their knowledge (as opposed to being simply given knowledge). Social constructivism is about engaging the learner-- with other people and with the process of learning.
Still, creating community takes time. It includes many different approaches, using a lot of different tools. Here are a few to begin a school year or class.
Artifacts: As students enter your classroom, what do they see? In what ways have you designed your space to let everyone know that they are welcome. There are lots of commercially produced posters and visuals that are fine, but perhaps more meaningful are the artifacts left behind by past students. These are the carefully chosen pieces of artwork and projects that can be displayed on your walls that communicate an openness to the richness and diversity of our world, with special attention to racial, linguistic, physical, cultural and gendered messages. A safe zone sticker on your door can speak volumes, as can the poetry of Tupac or the words of James Baldwin, or the written profile of Bayard Rustin
Physical Set-Up: The actual design of your room’s floor plan with the placement of desks is also an important consideration. The more we can move out of rows and columns, into clusters or groups (or even big circles) the better.
Day One: Creating community needs to be prioritized from day one! Too often, we jump right into the syllabus or (worse yet) the rules and expectations of a class. It just sends the wrong message. It seems to say, “who you are” is less important than “how you should act or behave”. Have fun with it. For example, I have the privilege of node desks in my room. They are the desks on wheels that allow for lots of flexibility and movement of a classroom design. So we spend about ten minutes competing in “Chair Olympics.” For this, I post a layout design on the board, and they are then given 30 seconds to re-configure the room into that design. It’s a lot of fun and kind of silly, but it also gets them moving. My last design is a big circle where we then do some sort of snap around! No matter what, make the day about creating connections.
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