Co-Creating Community
Adult learning takes place over a foundation of personal experience and knowledge gained throughout a lifetime. A classroom structure that encourages adult learners to actively participate in their education, apply their learning, and build community with fellow students, must acknowledge and include student life experiences.
Encouraging and acknowledging other students’ experiences and participation requires the acquisition of critical skills, like listening to others, contextualizing facts, and comparing interpretations. Students should recognize that they have valuable contributions to make to classroom conversations about storytelling, morality, history, and other subjects.
A co-created community is one where all participants—students and teachers—have invested their time, energy, and passion.
- A classroom set up as a facilitated exchange of ideas among peers is often more productive and effective than a top-down feeding of information.
- Adult learners often work best when they are invested in the work/course/process/community, feel welcome to share their thoughts, and trust that the facilitator will ensure that the conversation stays on track and meets intended learning goals.
- Teachers can co-create a learning community by
- setting group norms
- being transparent about their plans
- guiding the class steadily and respectfully
- being intentional with student-centered activities and content that recognize diversity and belonging
- As conflicts and challenges arise, a co-created community will make mitigating those conflicts much easier.
- Shared responsibility in the learning environment can have a ripple effect in the larger community, which can be a precursor of civic and community engagement.
“There’s something about pulling unlikely people together in a room to address and interact with a text that feels sacred and unique. We got to explore these big ideas that we don’t get to explore anywhere else because we’re so busy trying to figure out our grocery lists or how to help our children with school.”
– Anna Mangahas, Illinois Humanities Odyssey Project Graduate
Guiding Principles
Principle 1: Set Group Norms Together
Boundaries shape the dimensions of the class community and structure how students interact with each other, the teacher, and the course material. Co-creating classroom expectations can help establish a culture of respect, safety, and inclusion for everyone in class.
Faculty can prompt students to discuss the distinction between rules and norms, with an emphasis on norms being collectively determined and agreed upon. Norms could address questions like: How do we treat one another? What is our role as students? As teachers? How are we accountable to one another? What do we need to participate actively in the classroom community?
For more about norms,
see Suggestions for Setting Norms
Anecdote: Mispronunciation
In one norm-setting session, students first gathered in small groups to discuss norms they might propose. One student asked quietly near the end of his group meeting for an agreement that mispronunciation of words not be commented on in class. The other students in the group readily agreed, and the student’s vulnerability in the moment was repaid by a degree of trust that what may have been one of his more feared outcomes of course participation would not come to pass.
Principle 2: Be Transparent
Transparency about the curriculum, coursework, and pedagogical approaches can help create a shared sense of responsibility. Students who understand the reasons they are reading a text or doing an exercise are more likely to have a sense of purpose. When students have had a chance to ask questions and provide input, they are more likely to buy into the course as a whole. Adult students in particular are more likely to want to understand and care about the significance of what they are studying and to connect this to their own experiences and knowledge base. This can be a pivotal point in students’ learning and overall experience of the course.
Anecdote: Why this text?
In our classrooms in prison, faculty often hear questions like, “Why are you teaching this text? Is it because we’re in prison?” The most transparent response, whether the question is issued as a challenge or as an inquiry, is to answer truthfully, which can be difficult if the teacher realizes that the text was maybe ill-chosen. Even in such cases, honesty will be appreciated, especially if it comes with a lesson learned: “I usually teach this essay when I teach sociology, but to be honest I didn’t really think about how it would be read differently in this setting.” This could be a teachable moment, and lead to a discussion on how people in different situations view content from different perspectives based on race, religion, culture, or economic or social status.
Principle 3: Recognize Power and Accountability
Even a classroom with shared responsibility has a power structure, since one person sets the agenda, brings the syllabus, and evaluates student learning. Teachers and students have different roles and usually different levels of academic knowledge or experience, and it is important to acknowledge these differences. Faculty should be aware of the power differential—the students recognize it!—and hold themselves responsible for using their authority respectfully and thoughtfully. Students appreciate that someone is leading the course, but not if that person is controlling.
Principle 4: Create an Inclusive Classroom
With collective investment in classroom space, inclusion is crucial. All students, regardless of age, background, gender, sexuality, political stance, immigration status, race, ethnicity, and abilities, must be valued in the class community. But this does not mean glossing over disagreement or difference. As facilitators, teachers should acknowledge multiple perspectives, address microaggressions or conflicts when they occur, open conversation, and cultivate a space for students from all walks of life. At their best, inclusive classrooms can be spaces to repair past education experiences and develop new tools for interpersonal engagement.
Anecdote: New experiences
One student had been a child refugee from Cambodia, incarcerated after a period of teen gang life. He said to me, “Before I went to college, I never would have talked to you, because you’re white.” He explained that his experience in college helped him become willing and able to interact outside of his race for the first time.
Principle 5: Creating Community Can Be Contagious
When students experience the class community as an intentional space of mutual respect, challenge, and inclusivity, the tools each classroom member acquires can be replicated in other contexts as well. Norms can be set in social conversations or the family home; civil conversations may be had between people who fiercely disagree; different opinions, backgrounds, and belief systems may be treated with curiosity rather than fear; bridges across difference may be more easily spanned. At their most ideal, the ripple effects of class community building can encourage students to become leaders and feel empowered in civic communities.
Practices
Practice 1: Suggestions for Classroom Norms
Co-creating classroom expectations can help establish a culture of respect, safety, and inclusion for everyone in class.
Examples that can serves as starting points for classroom agreements:
- Speak from your own experience using “I” statements.
- Keep personal stories and identifiers confidential.
- Assume good intentions. Acknowledge harm. Make space for grace.
- Stretch yourself—learning happens at the edge of our ability—but don’t snap.
- Maximize learning and minimize distractions (do not multitask or engage in social media/emails while in class).
- Respect yourself, others and the space—stay present, use correct gender pronouns; ask the teacher or TA for support in private chat or email if needed.
- Make space in discussions using the W.A.I.T. mnemonic, asking ourselves Why Am I Talking? (This mnemonic may have its beginnings in business consulting.) More reserved personalities may need encouragement to take space and ask themselves Why Aren’t I Talking?.
- Strive for understanding—be open to learning from others.
- Challenge ideas and be open to being challenged.
- Expect unfinished business; in content and in conversation, we may find that we cannot cover everything and or answer everyone’s questions.
- Acknowledge/honor ambiguity!
- Practice consent—ask permission to take photographs.
- Take camera breaks on Zoom as needed.
At many sites, a class “contract” is written based on these discussions, then later printed and signed, as a reminder of the expectations of the classroom. In other classrooms, agreements are introduced by the teacher and expanded, amended, or agreed upon by students. Alternatively, group norms may be gathered and tended to over the years, as a long-term collection of classroom culture.