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It’s approaching two years since I wrapped up my project Building Learning Communities with Connections and Creativity, and nearly a year and a half since I left Goldsmiths. When I joined UAL, it was to manage a much bigger student community-building project, Post-Grad Community, and during that year not only did I learn an enormous amount on the job, but I also made time for reading, reflecting, and researching other student community projects, and I thought a lot about my first official foray into action research.

I still think the project was broadly successful, although there were some aspects that I was disappointed with and would have liked to give another go. While I was still at Goldsmiths, I integrated some aspects of the project, including running the Community Hub Moodle area and monthly Collaboration Circle events, into my business as usual work, and handed over the Community Hub to our work placements and internships manager when I left.

But what would I do differently if I were to run the project again? I’ve made a list and divided it into two categories – things I would do if I was working under the same restrictions, and things I would change if I had the power to alter my funding, timeline, etc.

Working under the same restrictions

The first thing I would do differently is that I would have done a big launch for the project. I didn’t do a big launch for the Community Hub in Spring 2021, when it started, because it was mid year and I thought the timing was off. I was also feeling quite nervous about it. It was the first time I’d stepped out of my support role to facilitate something with students directly and alone, previously I’d only worked with them as part of a working group or with teaching staff as intermediaries. It was also the first time I’d done a formal action research project. All that combined to make me feel more comfortable with the idea of a soft launch.

I did run induction sessions in Autumn 2021 aimed at new students, but I think it would have benefited both the project and my own career if I’d shouted about it from the very beginning. I could have done multiple induction sessions, including one for colleagues, invited people from other departments to hear about it. I’ve seen several colleagues at UAL working on action research projects invite other people in from the very beginning, so that their wider network is aware of the project and can help share information and promote it. There wasn’t that kind of culture at Goldsmiths, so it wasn’t something that occurred to me at the time.

Another thing I would have done differently is the recruitment, training and support of Student Community Leaders. I was new to managing students, and with more experience under my belt I know I could have set clearer expectations and provided more information about my inspirations behind the project. If I’d done a big launch they could have been invited to introduce themselves, and that would have provided them with more opportunities as well. 

The third thing I would do differently is to get alumni involved earlier on in the project. My most well-attended event was a podcasters’ networking evening, which I facilitated quite late on. If I had done that earlier, so I had time to do more, or issued a call-out for alumni to run online activities for students and fellow alumni, I think it could have benefited everyone enormously.

I would also have run a wrap-up event to report back on my findings and encourage more feedback. It would have been difficult to fit in with my workload at the time but I think it would have been a worthwhile investment.

With complete control

If I was bestowed with complete control over how I could use my budget and the timeline for the project, I would change a few more dramatic things.

Firstly I would start the project at the beginning of the academic year. That would have allowed me to have Masters or third year undergraduate Student Community Leaders, because I wouldn’t have needed students to be able to work across two academic years. It would also have meant I could have integrated the project launch into induction. Based on my experience with UAL’s Post-Grad Community, I think this would have helped boost attendance at events and enthusiasm for the project.

Secondly, I would have paid Student Community Leaders by the hour. Goldsmiths didn’t have a system set up for me to do this easily so instead they received a lump-sum bursary, and it made managing their time much more difficult than it could have been. UAL’s Post-Grad Community Ambassadors are paid by the hour via their in-house temp agency Arts Temps, and that is an infinitely better system.

Finally, if I had truly god-like powers and could start the project at the same time as the pandemic, I would have run coworking sessions for students and staff at the very start. This is something I did actually consider doing at the time, as I’d done online coworking before for my personal projects, and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t give it a go. Other people who started similar initiatives have said such positive things, and I think it could really have helped with the isolation everyone was experiencing during those initial lockdowns.

Reflecting on reflection

It’s been a really useful exercise to look back at that early project and think about how I would run it differently. I’m sure it’s something I’ll continue to think about as my career progresses – even now, just a few months since I finished managing Post-Grad Community, I’ve thought of dozens of things I would do differently if I could start over with that! I’ve found that we learn on the job, and develop our thinking in the next job, as we broaden our horizons, experience new institutions, and encounter colleagues working in different and innovative ways.

Today I’m excited to finally be publicly publishing a report on my 2020-21 project, Building Learning Communities with Connections and Creativity, which was funded by Goldsmiths’ Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre. As a result of this project, I was awarded a Student-Led Teaching Award by Goldsmiths’ Students’ Union, and it’s a piece of work that I am still very proud of.

It has been two years since the project concluded, so naturally I have moved on in my thinking about online and offline student community building. However I thought that it would be interesting to start by sharing an adapted version of my original project report, and then include my more up-to-date reflections in a follow-up post.

I originally wrote this report in March 2022 for stakeholders at Goldsmiths, University of London including teaching staff in my department, staff in the Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre, the Dean of Students, and the Student Engagement/Journeys team. I have adapted it for a wider audience by removing some Goldsmiths-specific links and adding in some explanations of the quirks of that institution – something I’m better able to assess now I’ve worked elsewhere!

Contents:

1. Project background
2. Platform development
3. Synchronous activities
4. Feedback and evaluation
5. Recommendations
6. How to run a Collaboration Circle

1.     Project background

This project aimed to explore the effectiveness of a platform on Learn.gold (Goldsmiths’ Learning Management System, which uses Moodle) created to build communities in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies by a) supporting peer learning and b) encouraging and supporting student/staff collaboration on academic and creative projects. Peer learning was to include reading, co-working, studying, and support groups.

I aimed to address a gap in current provision and investigate tools for group facilitation and techniques to encourage peer learning and promote collaboration, to make recommendations for best practice and successful student engagement. It was broadly accepted that we needed to spend time and resources on developing learning communities at Goldsmiths. In MCCS, student feedback at Staff Student Forums and focus groups repeatedly emphasised students’ desire to get to know other students on their programmes and within the Department, and to be supported in this by staff. Although many students engage with Students’ Union societies and other activities, even those involved in several groups have told us they would like to spend more time with other students in MCCS. This is reflected in the comments collected by the Department Rep authors of the 2019 Goldsmiths’ Students’ Union research report Communities – why they are important and how we create them[i]. The report suggests that co-curricular events can supplement contact hours and help students feel more of a sense of community within their department. We are keen for these to be student-led, because staff workloads are already high and we don’t want to duplicate the atmosphere of a seminar group. These groups need to be more social, to give students the chance to discuss their projects, goals and struggles and bond with their peers while they build academic skills. Our hope was that this would contribute to the development of student communities, an improved student experience, and higher student retention rate.

At the time I proposed this project in August 2020, the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic made the development of a supportive academic community that is inclusive of students at all levels even more important and urgent. As social distancing limited opportunities for students to meet in-person, it became our responsibility to find new ways to help students find academic support and friendship with their peers, providing online meeting spaces and guidance on using tools for social learning and creative collaboration.

In the years leading up to 2020, several groups of students created study groups on their own initiative – particularly at MA level, where students who struggle with the complexity of dense theoretical texts are often encouraged by teaching staff to do so. I had many conversations with students involved in these groups, often with the students leading them, and they spoke very highly of how these groups helped them bond with their cohort. They also help students to network and build relationships with others that will benefit them throughout their lives and careers. Before my project, the Department did not provide any resources to support the setting up of study groups, besides offering to send out emails to aid recruitment or to encourage undergraduate students to set up similar groups.

Similarly, there were also several groups of students in the department who attempted to set up collaborative projects. Some of these were a success, but all could have benefited from a central hub to advertise their projects and find co-collaborators. There are also inevitably many projects that never made it to fruition because students lacked space to float ideas, get feedback and find initial supporters. I aimed to change this by providing that space and designing it to suit their needs, with input from student reps and platform users as the project develops.

I also intended, as part of this project, to return to what I think of as the ‘Summer Term Problem’. It is traditional for UK universities not to teach assessed modules in the Summer Term, and set this time aside for exams, but every year we receive several complaints from undergraduate students about either the lack of contact hours or general feelings of disconnection in the Summer Term. During this time, third year BA students work on their degree show and we run some assessed modules, including our Work Placement module, and offer essay writing support, but these options aren’t of interest or offered to all students. In 2017-18 I piloted one way of tackling this problem with the MCCS 40^th Anniversary Community Fund, funded via the grant we received from the College that year. We asked students to propose group projects that would take place or culminate in an event during the Summer Term. However, attendance at live events remained low, as many students had already gone home before the events took place. The online platform aimed to make it possible for students to get involved in collaborative projects and events even if they have gone home during the Summer Term, and I wanted to look at how it can support learning communities to develop during this time and beyond the end of the undergraduate academic year[ii].

I set out to support the 2017-21 Learning, Teaching and Assessment Strategic Aim 3: Access, Inclusion and Learning Support as I investigated the application of innovations in technology in learning with direct input from students. The project also supported Strategic Aim 4: Extending our Reach – post COVID-19 the outcomes of this project have the potential to impact all students who find it difficult and/or unappealing to come to campus outside of days when they need to be there for scheduled taught sessions, such as students with caring responsibilities and commuters. These students benefit from flexible, online opportunities to socialise, study, and collaborate with other students.

2. Platform development

I initially set up the Moodle area, henceforth the MCCS Community Hub, based off my own ideas from previous conversations with colleagues and students in the department, and then when I recruited my Student Community Leaders[iii] we went through the area and discussed what they would most like to see added.

Ideas that the Student Community Leaders contributed included the suggestion that we provide resources for students who want to set up their own creative feedback groups, which I took forward to teaching staff who kindly put some guidance together. I also used the MCCS Community Hub to host some previously-written guidance on creating study groups which I had circulated via email at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The most popular of all the message boards was the Collaboration Station board, which students posted to most weeks seeking help with projects or offering their time and skills. Like all the boards in the Community Hub, it was set up with the auto subscription option, so that students are subscribed to get each post by email unless they opt out. Most students I spoke to during the evaluation phase did get a response, at least initially, from other students.

I also used the Collaboration Station board to post requests from students from other department for help with projects – typically from Music, Theatre and Performance, and Computing, as well as the Institute of Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (ICCE). Before I created the MCCS Community Hub, I would pass these on to relevant teaching staff and didn’t keep track of the requests and what departments they were coming from. It was interesting to note that we didn’t have any joint degrees with these departments (although at the time there were some Computing modules on BA Journalism and MA/MSc Digital Journalism programmes and there was a ICCE MA with a Media pathway) but there were many requests for collaboration. This is definitely something that I thought Goldsmiths could look at deliberately facilitating (see the Recommendations section for more).

The message boards and activities were promoted on MCCS social media, in single emails and newsletters, and via teaching staff. I included them in the Stuff to Tell Your Students[iv] roundups I produced several times a term for staff.

Challenges:

• I found it difficult to get in touch with some of the colleagues that I wanted to be involved in the project – central colleagues were too busy to meet and the appropriate members of Goldsmiths’ Students Union staff were furloughed due to Covid-19. However teaching staff in my department were happy to contribute when asked.
• Because the grant application deadline was pushed back to August 2020, I was not able to launch the project at the start of the academic year – I was not awarded the grant until November. This meant that the initial launch was quite difficult as I couldn’t use induction sessions or materials to introduce the students to the platform. Instead it was a soft launch – I set up the Moodle area, added all our students, and explained the platform at the start of all our events. In the following year, I integrated the MCCS Community Hub into our induction plans so that it was introduced at an online mixer for MA students and as part of an ‘Ask a Student’ event with our Student Community Leaders.
• As I was awarded the grant in late November, I had to wait until January to fully launch the project and recruit Student Community Leaders because of the Christmas break. This meant that in order to run the project for a full year, I had to run the project over two academic years rather than one and I also needed to recruit very quickly. This restricted my ability to recruit a diverse group of students. I could only recruit first and second year undergraduate students, because third year undergraduates and most postgraduate students would only be at Goldsmiths for half the duration of my project. I also did not have time to promote the opportunity as widely as I would have liked and try to recruit students from a diverse range of programmes and backgrounds. Ideally, I would have had time to speak to a greater number of students about the role with the aim of recruiting some of those who did not have a history of engaging in co-curricular activities.
• It was hard to get students to post to the message boards at first – probably because they were empty! To overcome this I encouraged students to do it during the live events and found that once one student had posted, others followed suit, and now students post to the message boards multiple times most weeks.
• The creative feedback groups board, although it came out of a suggestion from the Student Community Leaders, never took off. I thought that perhaps this is something that needs to be more integrated with practice teaching and recommended that teaching colleagues took this idea forward.

3. Synchronous activities

The resources and message boards on the MCCS Community Hub were supported by a range of online events led by both myself and the Student Community Leaders.

My aim was to encourage other students to run events for the Community Hub as well but although I had some very enthusiastic students attend my first How To Run Online Events session, this did not happen. If I were to run the project again, I would set aside some funding to be able to pay students to run events on a more ad-hoc basis. However I don’t consider my time running these sessions to have been wasted as students may use what they learned and what we discussed to run events for the wider community outside Goldsmiths.

MCCS Common Room

In response to student feedback, over the Winter 2020-21 break I set up a recurring Teams meeting for students to drop into if they wished to. Because there was a stalemate in the discussion about times, I set up it to be lunchtimes and evenings on alternate days, with a two hour ‘opening’. This was too much. Although students joined many times throughout the break, the window was too large and they kept missing each other because they would leave when they discovered there was no-one else in the meeting. We did not try this again but if you’re considering setting up something similar, I would suggest sticking to a single hour, and only once or twice a week.

Workshops

I ran two workshop-style sessions with presentations and Q&A, both twice during the life of the MCCS Community Hub so that I could reach both the 2020-21 and 2021-22 cohorts.

The first was ‘How to connect with other students and alumni online’, which became ‘How to connect with other students and alumni online and in person’ for 2021-22. This was essentially an induction for the MCCS Community Hub but I included other services and platforms like the Department social media and Students’ Union.

The second was ‘How to organise and run online events’ – as mentioned above I had some great discussions with students who attended the first session, but didn’t see any student-led events come to fruition while I was at Goldsmiths.

Collaboration Circle

During term time I ran a monthly event called the Collaboration Circle. This rapidly became the second most successful regular part of the MCCS Community Hub, after the Collaboration Station board.

At the Collaboration Circle students are invited to pitch any collaborative projects they are starting or thinking about starting, with the goal of finding people who would like to join in, and receiving advice and feedback. This went down really well right from the start – even if the sessions were quiet, I was able to advise students on sources of funding, venues for events, and promotion techniques, and normally students would find at least one person interested in getting involved in their project. I enjoyed running these so much I continued to run them after the official end of the project and even opened them to students in other departments.

After the first few sessions I developed the format, adding in the ‘Build a collaboration profile’ section, which then became the basis of an in-person version of the Collaboration Circle that I facilitated at the MCCS Big Day Out[v] in summer 2021. Please see the ‘Toolkit’ section for a full explanation of how to run a Collaboration Circle.

Collaboration Circles attracted 2-20 students each time. I tried different days of the week and ran them all at 5pm to avoid clashes with teaching but was unable to work out an ideal time or to find rhyme or reason behind attendee numbers. It was very random! Some students attended multiple circles, but most only came once to get advice and attract collaborators to their particular project.

Student Community Leader-led events

We had mixed results with the events proposed and led by the Student Community Leaders. We quickly found that students preferred events with a very clear purpose and agenda (hence the popularity of Collaboration Circles). Co-working events, open mics, student drop-ins, and very open discussions were unfortunately all poorly attended (with only one or two students joining the meetings). However, we found that two types of event did really well.

A documentary watchalong was popular – and easy to promote as the documentary chosen, Disclosure, was on the film list for one of the third-year MCCS modules. The Student Community Leaders reported that they had a really good discussion during and after the film, though this was all in text chat rather than over video/audio. This is definitely an event type that could be easily reproduced by other teams as it isn’t very resource intensive and can tie in to teaching.

Events aiming to help students with time management, planning, productivity etc also went down well. At the Ask a Student session I arranged for induction 2021, most of the questions were about managing workloads and studying, and two of the Student Community Leaders, Delia and Marie, were doing internships with Make Time Count and ran a pair of workshops on Dr Magdalena Bak-Maier’s ‘Grid’ organisational system that were really popular with students. These events serve to help students feel more connected to students in other years, giving more experienced students the chance to share their tips as well as providing new students with the opportunity to ask for advice.

Podcasters’ networking event

I wanted to broaden the scope of the Community Hub beyond just current students and reach out to alumni, running an event for students, staff, and alumni from MCCS who are podcasters or interested in podcasting. I chose podcasting because it is something we teach in the department on our journalism and radio programmes, but is also a very accessible form of media. I knew from promoting alumni achievements that many former students had started podcasts or had jobs in podcasting.

I contacted the alumni team and explained what I wanted to do, and they gave me the really useful advice to use Padlet to create a temporary board where attendees could post their social media and website links and other information before the event. They also sent out the event registration link on Eventbrite to the alumni mailing list.

I’ve run networking events in my own time before so I followed a similar format, adapted to online, and it went down really well. The event was held on Zoom, and I started by asking everyone to introduce themselves, and suggest a topic for discussion. Then I used the poll function to identify the most popular topics of discussion, and divided the remaining time up between them.

This event was a huge success and a lot of fun. We had 60 people join. Some had technical problems or left after a few minutes, but 48 were present for at least 20 minutes, and around 35 stayed for the duration. At the end one attendee created a Telegram group for the others to join so that they could stay in touch. I think attendees wanting to stay in touch is the greatest sign that you’ve run a really successful networking event!

I had hoped to follow this up with networking sessions for filmmakers, writers, and other creatives, but I decided to leave Goldsmiths for other opportunities before I could get this in motion.

4. Feedback and evaluation

At the official end of the project in December 2021, the Student Community Leaders and I discussed the project and the future of the MCCS Community Hub. Their reflections and my own have been included above.

I also reached out to students who had posted about collaborative projects on the message boards to find out how successful their projects have been. I emailed 37 students and received ten responses. I decided not to contact those who were simply promoting a survey or similar solo project, and the available contacts were limited as some students from the 2019-20 cohort had posted at the start of the project before their IT access ended, and no longer had functioning Goldsmiths email addresses. I had also deleted older messages on the Collaboration Station board at the start of 2021-22, so that new students didn’t reply to out of date topics. Seven of the students who responded to my email reported that they had managed to find collaborators via the message boards, the remaining three found them elsewhere or did not get a response.

Here are some quotes:

Amira (MA Cultural Studies) set up a writing group that meets regularly in person, using the message boards.

‘The writing group is going well! After the first session, attendance dropped off a lot, which was to be expected. Usually just a few people show up– one or two – but I think it’s been nice for people to just have that option to come when they can. Scheduling a time that worked for everyone was the biggest challenge, so I just resigned myself to choosing a time and people showed up if they could. School/tube strikes aside, I’ve rarely done a session alone. The regular feedback I get from people is that they had a space to work on things (poetry, creative writing, etc.) that they would have otherwise never done on their own, so I think it’s helped! Thanks again for set up a space for it and being so supportive.

And I should say, the community hub is really helpful for recruiting people because it is the one place where students can blast a message out to the entire department. I’ve also found interesting opportunities or enjoyed seeing what other people are up to through the hub. Thank you!’

Thomas (MA Journalism):

‘I’d say the photoshoot was a success and the message board was a key part in that. We got a number of replies in a very short span of time. I can’t think of anything else we would have needed in terms of support.’

Sofya (BA Media and Communications)

‘Last year I found a make-up artist via Community Hub and I also replied to a few collaborations. One was helping MA students to shoot their degree film, it was really fun, I met lots of new people and found a freelance job through someone from the crew.’

5. Recommendations

My main takeaway from this project was that supporting student collaboration offers Goldsmiths and other institutions the most potential for growth. Students want to meet other students and they want structure and purpose behind those interactions. Goldsmiths is known globally for being creative, but collaboration can also be more traditionally academic, or about political campaigning and social change. Students can work together on art and performance projects, but also on academic conferences and publications, and on projects they hope will change the world or serve the local community. And collaborative projects are often the most impressive – giving the institution more to proudly publicise, and to encourage alumni support for.

And the good news is that supporting student collaboration is not difficult at all. It’s been the easiest and most immediately successful part of this project. It’s a matter of learning and developing facilitation skills, and providing students with the tools to contact each other and make proposals for projects.

The MCCS Community Hub could be adapted into a Goldsmiths Community Hub, but I did not recommend this. I suggested that if this is attempted, the remit of the Moodle area is narrowed purely to collaboration – a Collaboration Hub, if you will – with more social and co-working style events provided elsewhere. This is due to the sheer size of the student body, the need to communicate clearly what each event/board/activity is for, and the potential for ‘mission creep’ if the remit is too broad. Some departments are already fantastic at providing opportunities for their students to develop learning communities – I had some really interesting discussions with colleagues in Theatre and Performance before the conception of this project –  and this should be supported and encouraged. But there was no support for collaboration between students from different department. While I was at Goldsmiths, students and staff had to email departments asking for emails to be circulated, which is ineffective and inefficient. I was a member of the Civic and Community Engagement Forum at Goldsmiths, and some time ago I was told a colleague was creating a list of helpful local resources for students such as venues where they can hold exhibitions. A Collaboration Hub or similar platform could hold this kind of information, along with links to potential sources of funding, etc. It would also be helpful if institutions could find ways to make facilities and equipment available to students for collaborative projects. One student reported that the project they tried to start via the MCCS Community Hub did not get off the ground even though they had found other students to work on it with them, because they could not access equipment.

6. How to run a Collaboration Circle

The Collaboration Circle was inspired by the Offers and Needs Market[vi], adapted to focus solely on collaboration. The Collaboration Circle has a simple agenda, allowing the facilitator to adapt the session based on the number of attendees.

I would begin by asking which attendees had projects or project ideas they wanted to share, and then give each student 5-10 minutes to talk. Most students simply talked through their project ideas, but some came prepared with presentations, mood boards of images, film clips, or other visual media to help them communicate their idea. After they talked through their idea and asked any questions they had for me about organising and promoting it, I would invite other students to comment, to say that they would like to get involved or to offer feedback on the idea, or both.

With a small number of attendees (fewer than four) I would end the session after the students finish pitching their project ideas. With a larger number (four or more), after the project pitches had finished, I would take students through the process of building a ‘Collaboration Profile’ – essentially a list of skills and interests – to help them generate ideas and discover what they have in common with other attendees. Students would then post their Collaboration Profiles into the chat, where they could comment on each other and swap contact details with people with similar interests.

To run a successful Collaboration Circle the facilitator needs to be able to ask supportive questions to help students develop and explain their ideas, and to have knowledge of services, sources of funding, and other resources students can access at their institution and beyond.

If you would like to see an example PowerPoint presentation used during Collaboration Circle events, please get in touch. Come back to this blog for my next post, when I’ll be sharing some more recent reflections on the project.

[i] Communities – why they are important and how we create them https://www.goldsmithssu.org/asset/News/6013/COMMUNITIES.pdf (see page 11 Question 3: What are the barriers to you feeling part of a community on your course or in your department?).

[ii] Goldsmiths has separate term dates for undergraduates and postgraduates – the undergraduate year finishes in July while the postgraduate year goes through to September and normally overlaps with the start of the following academic year. However, most staff think of the end of the undergraduate summer term as ‘the end of term’ for all practical purposes, as that’s when they are able to take long holidays and when the campus is quieter, and it is often treated as such.

[iii] Not to be confused with the Student Community Leaders the Students’ Union appointed before 2019, or with the Student Community Leaders Student Engagement/Journeys have appointed since – I borrowed the title from the SU’s defunct project not knowing Student Engagement would also do the same!

[iv] Stuff To Tell Your Students is one of my other proudest achievements, designed to tackle teaching staff overwhelm while encouraging word of mouth promotion. It was a digest of activities and opportunities for students I sent to all staff in MCCS, including items such as upcoming Careers Service events, Academic Skills Centre activities, public events, and funding opportunities. It included PowerPoint slides to make it easy for them to share during teaching.

[v] This was an event we put on for undergraduate students in MCCS in order to give those who had not had much in-person teaching that year a chance to come to campus and meet students and staff before the summer break. It featured a mix of talks, screenings, workshops and social opportunities.

[vi] https://offersandneeds.com/, also https://joelzaslofsky.com/offers-and-needs-market/

So, I’ve covered how I got into this work. But why is it so appealing to me? Why do I love it?

School’s out for ever

I loved my undergraduate university experience. But that had little to do with my course.

When I think back to what it felt like to be in education pre-18, mostly I remember how deeply bored I was. I yearned for freedom. Intellectual freedom. I had been one of those kids in primary school who tries to read a more interesting book under the desk because they’ve already read the textbook cover to cover. I’d got through my GCSEs with a minimum of effort, preferring to spend revision time reading novels, then battled my way through A Levels (willpower vs boredom), and by the time I got to university I was determined to finally enjoy my life and completely undaunted by being a first-generation ‘traditional’ (my dad is an OU grad) university student. 

It didn’t even occur to me I was at any disadvantage. I was too busy revelling in the glorious, glorious freedom. The optional reading lists were so long! I got to read multiple books every week! Possible essay questions filled a page! The Students Union offered so many societies! The library was full of books and films! There were masses of choices and most importantly, many, many of them were mine to make! I was finally in control of my learning and it was bliss.

Community by accident, not design

On the other hand, my social life was stalling. My coursemates didn’t seem social at all. After seminars everyone walked off in separate directions and I never saw them around campus or in the students’ union. I joined a couple of societies but didn’t make any lasting friendships. 

I know I’m not the only one whose social experience at university went like this. I was very lucky and made friends almost immediately when I finally moved into halls in the second term. We made our own mini-community and we’re friends to this day. Still, at the time, I felt like something was missing.

I found it when I started my MA. Same university. Entirely different attitude from my fellow students. After our very first workshop, someone said ‘Shall we go for lunch together?’ and we all went to the refectory as a group. I almost cried with delight.

And it didn’t stop there. One of my peers organised an additional weekly workshop session so that we could critique more of each other’s work. Another worked at the British Library and took us on a backstage tour. We worked together happily to organise the launch of our online magazine, running a cake sale and book sale to help stock the bar. One of the other students introduced me to my future partner. A group of us continued to meet once a month for over a decade.

I haven’t seen any other students from my undergraduate degree since my MA graduation – the one other student from my BA personal tutor group who came to our BA graduation also went straight on to an MA at Goldsmiths. 

Community by design, not accident

So what was different about my MA? First of all, as MA students of creative writing we all had a very strong interest in common. On my BA there were definitely people there who had chosen the course because it was their last chance at a free/low-cost education (2005…) or because they felt they ‘had’ to go to university and the course sounded okay. This wasn’t the case for my MA – I think the number of students who study creative writing as postgrads because they don’t know what else to do with their lives must be extremely low! 

Secondly, we had a number of students who were socially confident and proactive. Born organisers, who would take the lead, and happy volunteers, like me, who were reliable supporters.

But also, community was baked into the course design. You couldn’t just show up when it was your turn to get feedback, as that only happened a couple of times a term. You were expected to be there every week to give feedback to the other students, and prepare for it by doing the reading. And we were encouraged to spend time together outside of the official workshops, to run peer seminars and additional critique groups, to work together on our end of year publication and its launch event. Our tutors put the structures in place and gave us the info we needed, then it was over to us to take responsibility and make it work.

This is something I’ve seen many other course leaders do successfully over the years, but I’ve also seen a lot of unsuccessful attempts, where there wasn’t quite the right scaffolding to develop a community. It’s not easy. I’ve also made lots of unsuccessful attempts to build communities. Sometimes they just don’t stick because people have too much else going on. Other times, the community has grown and developed beyond my wildest dreams! 

Endlessly fascinating

I don’t think there is a foolproof method of community facilitation. Every single community is going to be an experiment, with different people, different priorities, and a different setting. But I think what is crucial, every time, is designing the scaffolding necessary to promote community development.

How we do that is something I don’t think has been studied enough. When I go to talks by people who have designed successful student engagement activities or built communities within their institutions, I often find the practical parts are sidelined in favour of outcomes. Presentations gloss over what the presenter did to get people talking, relating, and building things together – I think this is often because of time, but I find it disappointing! I can read about your outcomes on a slide. Tell me how you did it!

The detail is endlessly fascinating to me, and a vital part of the story. Outside of HE, there’s a lot more practical advice readily available, and I love to read and listen to it. But applying it to HE is fabulously challenging. Honestly, I adore how difficult it is! How do you build communities when students and staff have such varying levels of personal investment and interest? When many potential members may not yet have the necessary skills and self-confidence, and others assume competence that isn’t there? When institutions can be vast and hugely diverse and have many other problems that get in the way?

I’m passionate about this because I know what a difference a community can make to the learning experience, and I think that as the typical university experience changes more and more, thanks to demographic shifts and political developments, community building will only become increasingly important. I want to know what I would say if I could go back in time and talk to my undergraduate tutors. I want to know what we can do to improve things for students and staff now. I want to help figure it all out.

I became a professional community builder, initially, by accident. I was at Goldsmiths’ Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (MCCS), working as Assistant Department Business Manager (Communications and Publicity). When I got the job, it was a new post and unlike my job title, my job description was very short, but the intention was that I would focus on external comms, publicity, and supporting recruitment, with internal comms being secondary.

Enter MCCS’ governance system. They have a system of rotating leadership, with two Heads of Department (HoD), each one serving for 3-4 years before being replaced by another senior academic and rewarded with a year-long sabbatical. I liked this system because it meant that I got to know several of the senior academics really well, and it was always interesting to see what each HoD would focus on during their tenure, and how it would shape my work. They always had different priorities, whether actively chosen or forced upon them by circumstances.

Community building became part of my job when one HoD chose, as a priority, developing a sense of community in the department, and I was asked to support this.

Beginning where we were

At first I started to work with what we had, and what I was already good at – getting students to come to the extra/co-curricular events organised by staff. For a while, all that happened is that I got even better at getting students to come to these events. I did some research. I surveyed students about their communications preferences. They said they wanted to hear about events from teaching staff and Instagram, so I thought about how to make it easier for staff to tell students about these events during teaching and tried a couple of things that worked really well. I started an Instagram account and grew it one follower at a time by searching the Goldsmiths location tag for posts that mentioned studying one of the programmes we taught. I used Eventbrite for department event registrations so that students would get calendar items and email reminders. I persuaded the careers team to give me access to their system so I could track sign-ups and target promotions for the most relevant events.

But although it was fantastic to have more students attending the events we already put on, it wasn’t creating a community. Some colleagues thought that this would be resolved if there was a media society at the Students’ Union. The problem was that the students we spoke to with the capacity and interest to start a society (our student reps) were already on the committees for several, and didn’t have the time to do more. Twice over my four and a half years in that job, a group of students enthusiastically agreed that there should be a media society, and it never got off the ground.

The Students’ Union also tried several different initiatives. There was an attempt to create a supported ‘community’ for each department, with student community leaders who would organise events, but it ended up being the SU who did all the organisation for the one event they put on.

First steps

In the end, after having done my best to support other people’s ideas, only to see them come to nothing, and with Covid-19 chucking all the usual stuff out of the window, I decided it was time I took matters into my own hands.

There is nothing I love more, professionally, than launching myself at a really difficult and complex problem, and I took to this one with my usual zeal.

I agreed with colleagues that the solution was student-led activity. It was the only practical course of action. Academics and other teaching staff just had too much to do already. Their workloads were off the chart, especially with all the adjustments to be made for teaching online, and the Students Union staff were similarly overworked – or furloughed.

Yet students were clearly not going to do it without support. We needed to create opportunities for them to bond with each other and feel motivated to run collaborative activities.

It was clear to me that this was what was missing. At staff-led events, there was little to no attempt to facilitate conversation amongst students. We weren’t putting them into situations designed to provoke discussion or to let them share their own ideas. Even pre-Covid, we were always doing talk, Q&A, drinks, or worse, just talk and Q&A. The events also tended to have an academic focus – the talk usually related to careers or was delivered by a guest speaker. The students just weren’t on an equal footing. A community requires, if not absolute equality, then for your community members to know that they have a valued voice and the ability to organise things too.

It’s funny looking back on this now, because after a year at UAL, my ideas on community facilitation have matured massively and I would have done things totally differently at Goldsmiths. At that point, I hadn’t read a single book on community development. I hadn’t turned my critical eye on my own experience as a member of various communities. And crucially, I was still labouring under the belief that I was new to community facilitation and that it wasn’t something I’d been working on my whole life!

But there I was, staring down the problem, with an inkling of the solution. Next I needed to get some students involved, and for that I needed funding.

Goldsmiths’ Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre (TaLIC) offered grants every year for staff to do action research projects to improve the student experience, and they were open to professional services staff as well as academics.

As it was 2020 and most people were a bit distracted, I figured I wouldn’t have that much competition from academics, so I rocked up to one of the Teams meetings about the grants with a couple of ideas. The TaLIC facilitator liked my most community-focused one and helped me write the proposal. My manager and the HoDs let me do whatever I thought was a good idea so they signed off on it happily.

I got the grant, and my fate was sealed. I’ll write more about the project itself in future posts, but suffice it to say that although I did support some great student ideas, make some progress in my thinking, and win a Student-Led Teaching Award, I did not solve the problems of community building in HE within one year and a budget of £1,500. As time went on I became even more interested in it, so much so that I decided my time as a communications specialist had ended and student engagement was the way forward.

But let’s rewind slightly, back to the start of my project at Goldsmiths. In the early stages, when researching other institutions’ student community-building projects,  I came across UAL’s Post-Grad Community. It was totally unique. No other  student engagement project that I’d learned about in the process of my research came anywhere close to offering what PGC does. I remember looking at the website and watching some of the YouTube videos and thinking, ‘I’d love to be part of something like this.’

And then one day, I saw the job ad for the manager maternity cover post. My heart raced as I clicked through. I got the job, and it was a whirlwind of a year.

And here we are. But why do I love this work so much? That’ll be the subject of the next post.