Teaching and learning are always for a particular purpose. Most often, this purpose is grounded in benefits that accrue to communities of practice and local/global communities. Teachers and learners are part of these communities. Considering that a sense of community outside of the classroom itself is seen to be a social construction or ‘imagined’, teachers and learners need to be mindful of the spaces they create for communities to emerge and thrive. The point is that teaching and learning are community-driven, whether we imagine ourselves as being part of cohorts, group work, experiential learning, or other endeavours. In a pandemic or post-pandemic environment, creating a sense of community is particularly crucial for positive and vibrant teaching and learning experiences. The extraordinary time of the pandemic and remote learning gives us an opportunity to reconsider what it means to create a community (without the face-to-face classroom experience), what roles we play in these communities, and how we can develop our senses of self and connection to community.

INQUIRY

• What does a community look like for me?
• What is a learning community in my classes?How do learners and teachers benefit from a learning community (during COVID)?
• How do I build compassion and connection through learning communities (during COVID)?
• What conditions must be in place for a community to form?
• What makes community valuable?
• How do we design our online courses to create a learning community?
• How does the community in my classroom relate to or contribute to the broader community?

RECOMMENDED LINKS

  

• Thirteen Ways of Looking at Community
• 7 Strategies to Promote Community in Online Courses

OTHER RESOURCES

• The Importance of Building Online Learning Communities
• An era of disposable assignments?
• Community and Citizenship in the Computer Classroom
• Learning in the Collective