Universal (Co)Design: On the Importance of Community and Belonging

NOTE: An abbreviated version of this article was published in the Journal of Cinema Media Studies Teaching Dossier.

When looking over my students’ reflections for a course I recently taught called “Media Experiences and Digital Culture,” I was struck by how often they were pairing positive feedback about our class with a general frustration toward their other learning experiences at college:

“The structure/flexibility of this course has honestly been a godsend during this busy quarter. I really appreciate the flexibility of deadlines, range of different digital platforms through which class is conducted, and manageable workload… I wish more professors had this style.”

“This course was the best–structured learning experience I have had… I learned a ton, but none of it felt arduous. The culture of the class made us motivated to do work to be accountable to everyone else and ourselves for our learning, not a professor overlord.”

“I’m usually more a lone wolf and find that method easier in college where you usually don’t see the majority of your class outside of it, but I feel like this class has formed a really nice bond! I’ve appreciated the vibe that’s been curated of curiosity and openness, where it’s not weird to slide into someone’s Slack DMs and ask to join their project.”

“One thing I’ve unlearned is that rigid assessments, grades, and course structure promote engagement in the course. I much prefer the structure of this course, which is kind of like what you get out of it is how much you put into it. In this sense, you have much more agency over your learning.”

“This course has changed my perspective on how other courses are often unnecessarily burdensome on students in ways that don’t contribute to learning.”

“For the first time in a while…I felt that I was learning just for the sake of learning and that has always been something I’ve struggled with… I can only hope that academia at large will eventually follow suit.”

My takeaway from this is that our students are seeking a different kind of learning experience than they are used to getting. More specifically, it indicates to me that our students are yearning, even desperate for more learning spaces that are based in trust, choice, connection, and belonging. They want to feel that they are part of a community, that they are being seen, trusted, respected, valued, cared for, included, and that they matter not only as students but more holistically as human beings. We know from research that fostering this sense of belonging — the idea that I matter to this community and it matters to me — is more than just a moral practice; it is also promotes student engagement and leads to deep, transformative learning.¹

In this essay, I draw from my course “Media Experiences & Digital Culture” to reflect on a few ways I tried to cultivate student belonging. I often find myself wishing that our pedagogy frameworks did more to amplify the intertwined, social, collective nature of our learning journeys. The work of building a learning community that values wholeness and closeness is, as bell hooks reminds us, both a creative act of love and a political act of resistance, a purposeful break with the dominating culture that too easily and too often splits us up, closes us down, and hierarchizes us.² I am struck by Harper B. Keenan’s suggestion that we as educators might approach our work as a kind of “artful community organizing, supporting a group of people in identifying their needs and imagining ways of being together that would allow these needs to be met as consistently as possible.” ³

My community-organizing and belonging-building efforts involved pulling from and adapting four overlapping approaches. First, I worked to practice “engaged pedagogy,” which asks me to be vulnerable, to relinquish control, to value students’ whole selves, to center community, and to abolish harmful notions of “decorum” and authority;⁴ second, drawing from the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework, I built radical (but structured) flexibility and multiplicity into the course so that students could have agency in their own learning and make personal, diverse, collaborative connections with the material;⁵ third, the course included numerous opportunities for “experiential learning,” which mobilized learning-by-doing to springboard reflective and analytical conversations;⁶ and, fourth, through these approaches, we created the conditions for “emergent pedagogy,” where students and I became co-designers of a learning environment that valued exploratory contributions, community input, student-created assignments and case studies, and learning processes over polished outputs.⁷

A Horizontal Community

The course was an undergraduate seminar that explored the convergence of material culture and digital culture, focusing on the relationship between media industries, fans, and transmedia franchises in the contexts of today’s experience economy. It also opened out onto ethical questions about digital cultural production, algorithms and data surveillance, and the commodification of nature and culture as it relates to media tourism. Our learning team, comprising myself and fourteen students, made use of both physical and digital learning spaces throughout the term. I decided against using Canvas, our institution’s learning management system, in favor of more interactive and varied platforms; but, with digital surveillance being one of our central themes, I took it as an opportunity to share with students the wide range of data I could gather about them on Canvas, and how this data was fed into algorithms to suggest participation grades. They were not thrilled about this.

Adapting a design from Jesse Stommel’s “Digital Studies” course, we instead learned about media experiences and digital culture by experiencing digital culture through a suite of platforms:

• Medium (for student writing and feedback, as well as our “live” syllabus and schedule).
• Slack (for voice memo submission, group planning, announcements, and meme sharing).
• Padlet (for collaborative activities).
• Google Drive (for storing course readings and slides).
• Typeform (for ongoing course check-ins and self-evaluations).

I explicitly told students that, since part of what we are doing in this course is developing new media literacy skills, they should use the time we have together as an opportunity to play around with digital tools, remix content, and present work in a format that sparks them. Throughout the term, students ended up mobilizing a variety of other platforms like Canva (to design transmedia infographics; Squarespace, Carrd, Linktree, and Twitter (to present their final portfolios); Youtube and Vimeo (to share podcasts and video essays), and more.

The course was ungraded in the sense that it eschewed traditional grading in favor of ongoing student reflection that culminated in a final self-evaluation and community-based assessment, where each of us acted as readers, participants, audience members, and peer reviewers for each other’s work.⁸ Aside from short voice memo reading reflections that were submitted to me via Slack each week, all of our course assignments — four open-ended analyses, a final project, and a final portfolio — were presented to, experienced with, and given feedback by our learning community.⁹ I commented on student work like I normally would — only, I did so publicly, alongside other students’ comments, and without adding a quantitative grade. In keeping with Black feminist and anti-oppressive pedagogies, my implementation of community-based assessment sought to dissolve the student-teacher hierarchy, shifting coursework away from the traditionally vertical, private exchange between instructor and student toward a more horizontal, public act of contributing to our shared media diet and community conversations.¹⁰ The approach also seemed to motivate students to take ownership over their work, to create something unique and share that uniqueness with us, and to engage in creative kinds of knowledge production so that they might entertain us and teach us something new:

“I would like to really nail my final project… and would like to create something that the class also thinks is genuinely cool.”

“When fulfilling open-ended prompts like voice memos, Medium articles, etc. I feel a lot less pressure to “get it right.” I’m not trying to hit a buzzword on a rubric, so I’m actually thinking about what could be cool for the class to explore based on my own experience of the reading — which I’ve never had the chance to do before.”

“[Our group] put in a lot of work before break, during break, and after break to make it all come together and create an engaging experience for our classmates.”

A Brave Community

If we want to build communities that center diverse lived experiences, it follows that we should be drawing from diverse traditions of knowledge to develop our community-building practices. For me, this has meant supplementing academic scholarship on teaching and learning with guidance from community-based anti-racist organizations that specialize in restorative justice and collective care practices. When thinking about how I would form community with my students during this course, I leaned heavily on the wisdom of organizations like the Anti-Oppression Resource & Training Alliance, and Brave Space Alliance, a Black-led, trans-led LGBTQ+ Center on the South Side of Chicago. These organizations offer brilliant methods for inclusive facilitation and norm setting, and they challenge us to start with a simple, terrifying practice: trusting our students, and viewing them as the experts of their own learning experience.

On the first day of class, I dedicated a significant amount of time to forming Brave Space Agreements (BSAs) with students. I began by asking them why we might call it a “brave space” as opposed to a “safe space.” This question invited students to critically examine the politics of safety and to be specific about what it looks and feels like to take risks in a supportive environment, to stay silent or speak up, to be vulnerable, to offer support, and so forth.¹¹ I then displayed a set of agreements on the projector, and split students into pairs. Giving them about 15 minutes, I asked folks to discuss the list and add, edit, or amplify particular statements using Padlet. Through these conversations, students amplified agreements about taking care of themselves and recognizing that they have unique, valuable contributions to make to our shared learning space. They also added words like “patient” and “trusting” to describe the learning community they sought to create. Collectively, we landed on our final version, which I then added to our syllabus. Through this activity, we fostered a sense of belonging by articulating our shared goal to create a supportive, courageous learning space, by acknowledging that what is presented in this space is genuinely open to student input and change, and by explicitly centering students’ wholeness and wellbeing. One student wrote in a reflection:

“The attention to detail in the first class surrounding our brave space agreement and encouraging us to learn about each other through introductions was a refreshing change of pace from my typical classes. These items specifically made me feel seen and heard immediately in a space where I initially felt intimidated by the RTVF major/minors.”

Importantly, we return to these BSAs throughout the course during self-reflective course check-ins. This affords students a chance to suggest amendments and develop metacognition by reflecting on their own positionally within the culture we’ve established:

“I’ve always had a lot of trouble participating in class but I have felt in the past week or two I have been able to share my thoughts without feeling super nervous. I will definitely keep improving over the quarter but I think the environment does make me feel like my work is valued.”

“I feel brave/valued in the space, whether that occurs through someone expanding on my point in class or commenting on a Medium post or whatever else.”

“…we can probably all do better as students to be more present during class — maybe listing this more explicitly in the BSA would keep ‘being present’ … in the forefront of everyone’s minds.”

“I think we’ve all done a good job respecting each others rules and wishes. I’ve definitely been trying to talk less and open up the floor to others. I have a problem not shutting up sometimes.”

A Flexible Community

With the aim of making my class “more engaging and accessible for all,” I integrated the UDL principle of building flexibility and multiplicity into as many aspects of the classroom as I could — from the content we covered to the formats and materials we used, to the way we assessed student learning, to how student engagement was structured both with each other and the material.¹² I explicitly told students that our course will ask them to make more decisions over their own learning than they might be used to. When asked to analyze a digital interface, for instance, students were invited to pick a media platform of their choosing; when asked to analyze a theme park ride, they were invited to pick the attraction; when asked to develop an existing intellectual property into a transmedia franchise, they were invited to pick whatever brand or story they wanted. With most of these assignments, I let students choose whether they work in groups, in pairs, or individually. I also encouraged them to think beyond Medium, and to submit their work in whatever form made sense to them.

Offering students this much agency can be terrifying for everyone involved. Similar to UDL, trauma-informed approaches emphasize that in order to provide our students with a sense of internalized control over their learning journeys, we need to structure our flexibility by giving transparent, clear, consistent instructions well in advance, and checking in on students throughout the process.¹³ During our week on media tourism, for instance, I integrated structured flexibility in the form of a “teach-the-class” activity. I provided a folder of selected readings on media tourism, and told students that, in pairs, they could select any reading they wanted and sign up to “teach-the-class” later on in the week. This simple activity not only afforded students agency and reinforced our community-based model of assessment — they were going to show us something new — but also took our classroom conversations into new directions that I certainly would never have thought to go. Alongside my students, I learned so much on these days.

Consistently building these moments of choice into the course meant that, when it came time for students to design their own final projects, they had already practiced making tough decisions about their learning and taking creative risks. For the final project, I offered structure in the form of a few basic parameters and 12 ideas that were purposefully vague and open. By offering so many half-formed ideas, I hoped to indicate to students that I was literally just brainstorming, and they could feel comfortable doing so too. I had students submit a pitch to me on Slack, and then we met one-on-one to discuss and set more specific parameters around each project. The range and creativity of these projects truly blew me away. One student created an interactive website analyzing the promotional practices of A24; three students teamed up to stage a Dune escape room for us live in class; one student wrote a Medium post that followed audio memes on TikTok; three students headed to a local media experience and crafted a video essay; one student designed a “4D” interactive exhibit in the classroom; one student made a reflective audio tour and map of their hometown; one student gave a talk about “Behind The Attraction” on Disney+; one student interviewed a Disney executive for a podcast about Genie+, and so on.

Students indicated throughout the term that they enjoyed this structured flexibility and multiplicity, saying that it offered them a newfound agency and freedom to engage with the material on their own terms:

“Having agency in the way I engage with the class has given the class more meaning to me. I think that I work best collaboratively, and this class has introduced me to working with new people that I honestly consider to be my friends now!”

“Having more than just readings as class material has been very successful for me. Sometimes I want to be productive but do not have the energy it takes to read a text, so videos and clips are useful. The freedom to chose how to present allows for more creative uses of media which challenges me to try new things.”

“I think this course in a lot of ways is a ‘choose your own adventure.’ Because I can choose what I want to dive into, I’ve been able to choose topics and projects that are meaningful and inspiring for me.”

“I like the option to choose my own learning path and not having to do the exact same thing as my classmates. I also really like the freedom of the final project and not having to work in a group because I tend to find group work pretty uneven. I appreciate how this differs from other classes and gives me room to experiment with many mediums.”

An Experiential Community

Because “experience” served as a conceptual anchor for our course, I tried to arrange opportunities for us to collectively experience course concepts like interactivity, immersion, social presence, temporality, and placed-ness as a learning community. During a week on “eventful viewing,” we took a field trip to see the premiere of Dune in IMAX; during our week on virtual reality, students went to the VR Lab on campus and recorded a podcast episode talking about their experience; during our week on theme parks, which fell on Halloween, we played a game of watch party bingo for The Muppets Haunted Mansion on Disney+; while reading about escape rooms, we played a digital escape room together on Gather; after reading about industry efforts to shut down unauthorized fan gatherings, we played a game of “unauthorized” pub trivia that doubled as our final exam. Using experience as a “text” alongside the weekly readings, visuals, Youtube clips, and other media provided students with a foundation for discussions and encouraged students to draw connections between the course material and their everyday lives. One student made this connection clear:

“These experiences have allowed us to apply course concepts to things we do in real life. Now, when I’ve had similar experiences in my life I find myself thinking about our class. For example: I live in a house of Taylor Swift stans so when they all listened to the re-release of RED in makeshift costumes and made niche references I was thinking about our class.”

These connections spilled into our Slack workspace. Channels like #reminded-me-of-you invited students to share and build conversation around things they came across “out there” in the world that reminded them of class, while #dune-hype became a space for us to share self-created memes, promotional paratexts, and collectively anticipate — and in a sense, experience fandom — leading up to our field trip to the movie’s premiere. Students recorded #introduction videos at the beginning of the term and submitted links to their work on the class #publishing-stream throughout the quarter. #Looking-for-a-group served as a community bulletin board, where students shared ideas for assignments and linked up on projects.

In these channels, ideas and course texts emerged and evolved as students made collaborative connections, and assignments were co-designed by peers and with my support. Over the holiday break, for instance, I had students design paratexts to promote their final projects. This was already modeled for students, since we had spent a week analyzing movie trailers and a month creating our own paratextual “hype” around Dune earlier in the quarter. Students had also seen a range of DIY paratexts throughout the term, since I often designed them to advertise our upcoming course experiences. Through the process of creating and sharing promotional material for their final projects, students not only mobilized course concepts to build shared excitement around their work; they also began thinking about their projects as something worth promoting.

Importantly, staging experiences as a class runs the risk of building additional barriers for student learning if not affordable and accessible, announced well in advance, and clearly signposted in the syllabus and course description.¹⁴ But by viewing everything we did, learned, and created as an “experience” we were sharing together, our community was able to connect with course material and each other in ways that felt unique and special:

“I’m excited to continue having experiences as a class together.”

“I’m looking forward to creating my own experience with a team for our final project!”

“Having shared experiences with classmates levels the playing field in terms of being able to discuss our class curriculum.”

“This style of engagement created a sense of familiarity that is rarely found in quarter long classes. I think it gave everyone the confidence to take bigger risks than they otherwise would have and I think that’s super important.”

“The experiential learning has been one of the most amazing things about this course. It’s been a really unique experience that I haven’t gotten as much in other courses. It’s allowed for much deeper engagement in the material and application of course concepts. It’s also allowed me to connect with people in the class in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Living In Community

I would like to end by acknowledging that my positionality as a white, able-bodied, younger, cishet man deeply impacts the way I move through the classroom and affords me a de facto “authority” that I am then able to “radically” shed. I was also in a particularly privileged position to create this kind of community, since I had a light teaching load and a small class size at an institution with ample resources and funds. It seems to me that if we are serious about creating learning spaces where students can experience true belonging, we need to address the structural conditions that make these spaces feel like some kind of utopian dream. The work of cultivating community and belonging is exhausting in a system where students are made to value grades above all else, and it’s unsustainable in a system where instructors are being given inadequate material resources, overloaded classrooms, unmanageable workloads, and precarious appointments. But as we try on and adapt various pedagogical approaches to meet the needs of ourselves and our students, I want to suggest that “learning to live in community should be a core practice” of our equity and belonging work.¹⁵ My attempts in this particular class looked like a combination of vulnerability and horizontality, multiplicity and structured flexibility, experiential and emergent learning, community-based assessment, and metacognition through self-evaluation.

One way I have tried to connect all of these concepts is to model what it looks like to be an open, excited, vulnerable learner. This has helped me transcend my fear-based mindset about having to be the “expert,” and it also suggests to students that I am eager to learn from them, and from what emerges in our shared space. Our first assignment of the quarter asked students to analyze their “spatial selves” on social media.¹⁶ I wanted to solidify the community norm of engaged, emergent learning so I decided to do the assignment along with them, writing about my experience converting and living in a campervan for a year during the COVID-19 pandemic. My goal was to model for students how they might activate course concepts and integrate links and multimedia to create interactive Medium posts. More than this, I hope, it communicated to them that I was bringing myself into this experience with something personal to share. No student should be forced to bring their whole selves into an environment if they don’t want to. But through the strategies above, I tried to let them know that they could be vulnerable, brave, creative, and excited — in short, that they belong — in our shared learning space.

Notes

1. Catherine Shea Sanger, “Inclusive Pedagogy and Universal Design Approaches for Diverse Learning Environments” in Diversity and Inclusion in Global Higher Education, ed. Catherine Shea Sanger and Nancy W. Gleason (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 33; also see Terrell Strayhorn, College Students’ Sense of Belonging: A Key to Educational Success for All Students (Routledge, 2018), 3.
2. bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (Routledge, 2003), 37, 49.
3. Harper B. Keenan, “Building Classroom Communities: A Pedagogical Reflection” in Lessons in Liberation: An Abolitionist Toolkit for Educators (AK Press, 2021), 157.
4. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994).
5. Anne Meyer, David Rose, and David Gordon, Universal Design for Learning: Theory and Practice (CAST Professional Publishing, 2014).
6. David A. Kolb, Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development (Pearson Education, 2014).
7. Anne Dalke, et. al, “Emergent Pedagogy: Learning to Enjoy the Uncontrollable — and Make It Productive,” Journal of Educational Change 8.2 (2007), 113–130.
8. Asao B. Inoue, “Community-Based Assessment Pedagogy,” Assessing Writing 9 (2005), 208–238.
9. My idea for weekly voice memo reflections was inspired by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, “Listening to a Train of Thought: Voice Memos as Alternative to Discussion Board Posts,” Flow 27.5 (2021). I also gave students the option to submit written responses each week if they felt uncomfortable or preferred working through their reactions via writing. No students chose this route, but at least making the option available afforded students another choice along their learning path.
10. hooks, Teaching to Transgress; Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 72; also see a recent article from Hamidreza Nassiri, “Justice-Oriented Exploratory Co-Creation (JOEC): A Proposed Method for Teaching Online Media Production Courses” JCMS Teaching Dossier (Summer 2021).
11. Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens, “From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces: Anew Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice,” From the Art of Effective Facilitation (Stylus Publishing, 2013), 142.
12. Sanger, 35.
13. Janice Carello and Lisa D. Butler, “Practicing What We Teach: Trauma-Informed Educational Practice,” Journal of Teaching in Social Work 35 (2015), 262–278.
14. I made the mistake of not being clear in my original course description that two of our optional experiences would take place outside of class time. This presented challenges for one student in particular, who wrote during a check-in: “…in the future, it would be cool to have the experiences scheduled to occur during class time to make them more accessible for people who are busy at night.” The student is absolutely correct. This is an instance where my practices were not aligned with UDL frameworks, and one that speaks to the challenges of embracing emergent (co)design while also remaining equitable and trauma-informed.
15. hooks, Teaching Community, 162.
16. Raz Schwartz and Germaine Halegoua, “The Spatial Self: Location-Based Identity Performance on Social Media,” New Media & Society 17.10 (2015), 1643–1660.