Building Networks

What I found to be challenging in a self-paced, independent learning situation where any student can be on a different topic of a different subject at any point in time is how to build community in the classroom. During the pandemic, building community has been even more difficult because of the loss of the communal setting in the classroom. At least in the classroom environment, those who attended class developed relationships—they went out for smokes or coffees together, stuff like that. But in this virtual environment and in that specific kind of learning environment—self-paced, independent learning with individualized learning plans—it is quite difficult to build community

At the beginning of COVID, when I would contact a student, we would sometimes just converse about what's going on in life. It may not have been a planned teaching moment, but there were still teaching moments in those conversations. We talked about different media sources and the validity of those media sources, and the fact that you ought to make an assessment pertaining to the credibility and validity of the source. There was some critical thinking going on. I also encouraged self-advocacy. Like I said, they weren't planned teaching moments—they were spontaneous and authentic. I would call a student, and sometimes they didn’t want to talk about English or math or science, and instead we started talking about their lives. There was a valuable depth to those conversations. I would also learn something new. 

I feel like I've developed better relationships with people who I've known for years. Some students have reenrolled in the program two or more times since I've been here, but we haven't really been able to connect because of the classroom situation where there are other people around. The classroom is not always conducive to building teacher-student relationships. Now I have the increased opportunity for personal conversations with students who attend on a weekly basis. We converse about their lives and how I could help them progress on their academics. 

COVID gives us a commonality. It's like an intimate experience that we're all experiencing in different ways. We're all potentially in jeopardy because we don't know how we're going to react to the virus. I guess there's some sort of bond that can be created. If you think about the military, or police services, or firefighters, they tend to develop very strong camaraderie within those groups because of the dangers that they're all facing together. Facing the possible dangers of COVID is not the same thing as facing the dangers experienced by first responders, but there’s something present that may help people communicate better with each other and help people relate better to each other. But I think you still need a reason to connect—you still need some other shared interest. For us here, it’s education, and education through a small satellite campus in the community; a campus that's been here for around 35 years. I think this helps to create a foundation where we can develop relationships, and COVID has been a catalyst for sure—it has helped to increase the speed at which teacher-student relationships form. But if we look at the polarization in society in other realms, it seems COVID has been more divisive. This is an interesting contrast. 

I wish that our learners had known about all of the digital communication options available to them. Many of our learners never used anything but one type of communication tool, the phone, because they grew up in a time without ready access to computers or tablets or texting—so they default to our landline phone so often. But when COVID shut everything down, and when we closed the Learning Centre office, many of our learners become completely disconnected, both from us and others.

What I'm saying is, I wish these learners would have taken us seriously when we were at their home trying to teach them new ways to communicate. Again, people's learning is all wrapped up in complicated personal histories, so I don't want to place blame on our learners entirely for this scenario. And if we'd known about how COVID would affect our learners, I certainly would have worked to find some creative ways to get them a little more knowledge on communication and the ways they can stay connected in our changing world.

Race and colonization also complicate how we offer knowledge to our learners. We never want to force ourselves into or onto any Indigenous community. Most of our SHLC staff are white-passing, and nearly everybody we work with here in Sioux Lookout is Ojicree. We certainly don't want to be the white people forcing anything on the local Indigenous community. That style of learning is problematic, is wrapped up in a terrible genocidal history, and also just generally doesn't work that well. So learning has to be brought up and initiated by our learners first, by the community, and sometimes that can take a long time. Also, learners are real people, and people often have lots of stuff going on in their life. Learning often isn't high on the list of priorities.

After the crisis is over, we are going to keep the flexibility in the way we deliver training. Some learners, surprisingly, are very comfortable at a distance. To some of them, it provides freedom. So we will go back to our classroom but also keep some form of distance training to answer the needs. Learners will work more collaboratively in the future. We find ourselves in an environment where we can all communicate; learners have been more proactive in helping each other and we will try to keep that collaborative environment.

We have a learner who has balked at doing anything online for a year or so.  He was not able to attend his AA meetings because of COVID-19.  We loaned him a laptop and helped him access online local meetings. The deal was that he would do some other learning as well. After successfully accessing local meetings, where people knew him, he started attending meetings all over the world. I think it was a sense of impishness that got him doing that. Attending the meetings that he really needed, got him out of his shell and motivated him to learn how to be online. He now uses Zoom and other learning platforms for a variety of things. We didn’t teach him how to access other community’s meetings, but I thought it was great that he figured that out. 

I hope that we can stay online in some way, shape or form because there's things I can do online so much better. I never, never would have said this at the beginning. 

Are there things that are better in the classroom? Yeah, like technical problems. Teaching computer stuff. Math sometimes, drawing fractions and whatnot. There are some things that are better face to face. 

But how our group interacts online. 

In the classroom, I can't tell you how much time I waste getting everyone together. And there's too many people. And you're always teaching at the level—not the lowest person—but you have to go to the level that they can cope with so there's always some people who are bored.

Online, it's more interesting, and it's more vibrant. And even the people interaction is great. Apart from me, they will chat with one another on there without me either online or in chat.

I would like to think that people who come into the classroom go away learning more than this specific thing that they came in to learn about. Somebody may have come in to upgrade their math skills so that they could take a math course and then go back to college, but they may have the opportunity to learn something else because somebody else is working on English skills, or you're talking about a newspaper article or something like that. I think it's about opening their mind to, or being aware of, the people around them and things that are happening. If they are participating in conversations or observing things around them, they have the opportunity to learn more and collaborate more. Their ability to contribute to society and their self-confidence in their abilities, and so on and so forth, increases. And I think that it's something that all of us have probably experienced on more than one occasion within an adult literacy experience. 

Recognizing that adult learning can often support development of social skills, relationships, trust, engagement, and other unintended consequences that might only be captured by moving from measures of earning toward measures of learning in the broadest sense, and drawing on Lin’s (2001) definition of social capital as “the resources embedded in a social network that can be accessed or mobilized through ties in the network” (p. 49), a measure was developed, comprised of four dimensions. These included the quality of one’s social networks, such as trust, efficacy, diversity, and inclusivity; the structure of one’s networks, which involves size, power relations and modes of communication; the transactions that occur within one’s networks, such as sharing support and knowledge; and the types of networks, which include bonding, bridging and linking types.

A Portrait of the Adult Learner: Pluralistic Interpretations of Literacy Learning Outcomes Over the Years 

by Maurice Taylor and David Trumpower, University of Ottawa

in Adult Literacy Education Journal, Spring 2021

Connectivism is a learning theory that explains how Internet technologies have created new opportunities for people to learn and share information across the World Wide Web and among themselves. These technologies include Web browsers, email, wikis, online discussion forums, social networks, YouTube, and any other tool which enables the users to learn and share information with other people.

A key feature of connectivism is that much learning can happen across peer networks that take place online. In connectivist learning, a teacher will guide students to information and answer key questions as needed, in order to support students learning and sharing on their own. Students are also encouraged to seek out information on their own online and express what they find. A connected community around this shared information often results.

from Learning Theories

re Connectivism: A learning theory for the digital age. by George Siemens

in International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 2(1), 2005, 3-10.