We are proud to announce that Equity Unbound has teamed up with OneHE (whose mission is to build a global community of educators focused on better teaching) to develop some open educational resources for online community-building. We have developed activities for teachers to use in their classes (for HigherEd mainly, but many can work for K-12 as well).
Each of these resources includes a video either demonstrating or describing the activity or exercise for community-building. We also include descriptive text, slides you can reuse/adapt where relevant, and links to additional resources. We also show you how much time, what kind of resources you need, and different variations on the activity to help you adapt it for your purposes.
Important: Any technique can block some people out, make them feel unwelcomed, or be used in a way that privileges some and makes it harder on others. All of these techniques should be used in conjunction with pedagogies of care and what we call Intentionally Equitable Hospitality.
As you watch/read any of these, please:
- If you find that the activity is not hospitable to a certain group, please let us know in the comments (videos are hosted on Virtually Connecting’s YouTube channel and new videos will be added to a playlist)
- If you try an adaptation of this activity, or try it as is and have interesting results to share, please contribute your adaptation/reflection in the comments.
- Coming soon: there will be room to discuss these activities in private discussion forums on OneHE’s site.
Are you ready? We are launching these gradually, and today, we are launching the following activities (click on each one to visit the resource):
Welcome and how to use this resource:
https://oneheglobal.org/equity-unbound
- Spiral Journal
- Surrealist Drawing Introductions
- Story of Your Name
- Four Ideas for Checking In
- Third places for ongoing community building
More soon, including Mad Tea which is an energizing warmup activity for any class or workshop or meeting!
Added August 20, 2020
Mad Tea (currently considering renaming because someone made us realize that “mad” is an ableist term potentially offensive to people with mental health challenges)
Authentic Open Letter/Video for Students
Added August 21, 2020
Safety Considerations for Community Building by Kate Bowles
Added August 24, 2020
Asynchronous & Synchronous Introductions
Added August 25, 2020
Pass the Ball/How Do You Make Rice
Added August 27, 2020
Collaborative Literature Review Matrix
How is Your Heart – Trauma-Informed Pedagogy
Added August 31, 2020
Purpose to Practice for co-developing community guidelines
Added September 2nd, 2020
Conversation Cafe (discussion topic: what makes for a good video call)
TRIZ for creative problem-solving (discussion-topic anti-goal: how to create the worst possible online learning experience)
Added later in September, 2020
Room 101 encourage students to think critically about things they would like to “remove” from the world or the course.
What Kind of Animal Are You? introductory activity
Share an object from home… warm-up activity
Teaching (engineering) ethics with Theater of the Oppressed & Liberating Structures
Feel free to contribute adaptations or new ones. Follow @Unboundeq @OneHEglobal on Twitter for updates and Virtually Connecting YouTube channel and subscribe to OneHE Mailing list
Header image: Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay
