The MA Performance: Society (MAPS) course is technically a low-residency program, but in practice, the majority of the course is delivered online. Students only meet in person once a year, and some never meet due to travel constraints. As a result, generating a sense of belonging has always felt important.
In the article titled Home Sweet Home: Achieving Belonging and Engagement in Online Learning Spaces, Lewis and Leigh Ross write that ‘successful virtual environments’ support experiences of ‘ownership, connection, and co-creation’ (Lewis & Leigh Ross, 2022:78). They go on to suggest that a creating a shared sense of space is key to nurturing and strengthening learning. Reading this article reminded me of how much emphasis the course places on locating devices such as arriving together as a group, arriving into a digital space, and arriving in our bodies as we begin each session. For example, at the start of the course we use an interactive map so we can see where we all are.
We spend time looking at how far apart or close we are. We then added to this map by uploading a guided tour called Where I am now, that students were invited to do during the summer. It is both a light-hearted task and a profound one, as students must begin to identify what is important to them about their sense of place. They are invited to revisit this assignment at the end of the course to see how their perspectives have changed.
Situated encounters
Lewis & Leigh Ross promote the use of dance as an icebreaker. I see now, that much of the work in MAPS concerns devices that bring awareness to the body and our immediate environments into our shared encounter within a digital space. One example includes the performance score called ‘The Body as Home’ by Andrea Olsen (2018), where students are invited to consider their embodied, rather than their artistic or academic, history.
Other strategies we use include:
- Looking out of the window and sharing what we see.
- Conducting a “temperature check” literally and metaphorically
- Adjusting their environment for comfort (e.g., using blankets or fans or tea).
Acknowledging whether we are hot, cold, confused, joyful or hungry invites openness and the possibility of change. I see that these methods invite a recognition of learning as something situated and relational within the course.
Belonging
Dulfer et al. argue that ‘[r]egularity of contact, its stability, as well as affective concern can promote a sense of belonging’ (Dulfer et al. 2024:2). In my experience, reliability is pivotal in strengthening the potentially fragile connectivity of online work. A sense of home is generated through regular structures such as meeting at the same time every week and a weekly ‘Monday email’ detailing student successes, news, and weekly tasks. We also created maps of things we can lean on, identifying our local and global communities of support.
Moving forward
UAL has suspended this course and launched UAL Online, which is structured around asynchronous content. Whilst I am sad to lose the rich intensity of synchronous connection within digital spaces, I am interested in developing asynchronous tasks that generate community such as chain-mail devising processes, accumulative collaborations or online collaborative processes where students create work together by responding to material asynchronously in Miro or other online spaces.
References
Dulfer, N., Gowing, A., & Mitchell, J. (2024). Building belonging in online classrooms: relationships at the core. Teaching in Higher Education, pp 1–17.
Lewis, L. & Leigh Ross, S. (2022) Home sweet home: achieving belonging and engagement in online learning spaces. Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal. Vol 5: 1 (2022) pp 71–81.