Building Communities of Teachers: Stories from the Classroom, How to Scaffold Learning Adventures Through Trust
Authors: Dooly Zeta 
Published: December 2023

Education is recognised as a viable pathway to a better future. It is not a linear rite of passage but a meandering recognition of learning along the way. The advocacy of education for all, internationally, has led to education policy implementation across our global citizenship albeit at differing levels of accessibility and quality. It is widely recognised that the seminal work of Freire, Rousseau and Dewey have embedded the importance of active learning and critical pedagogy in our modern society. But have our leaders of education sufficiently recognised the need to promote education as a sustainable, complementary activity to social and caring aspects of our society.

This paper focuses on strategies used to build a sense of community in a classroom of educationalists who through their own learning experiences gain empowerment.  Drawing on 3 iterations of delivering a module in synchronous virtual classroom, the strategies adopted are outlined, the overall theme is to enable the building of trustworthy relationships and to teach educationalists to embed beliefs and values into their teaching practice. Aspects of the induction period are designed to foster resilience and wellbeing in the teacher cohort for digital and physical life so that students feel nurtured and gain confidence to grow and empower others within the learning lifecycle.

Following on from the global pandemic, most formal education ecosystems had to temporarily pivot to digital education. Reflection and critical thinking beyond COVID position digital education at a juncture that needs careful consideration to understand the giant leap required to utilise advancements in technology in a classroom. This paper presents a pedagogical approach that tightly couples classroom dialogue with the application of existing technology for teaching and learning at level 9 (Masters) to surmount a sense of uncomfortableness encountered for teachers when faced with moving from a whole group, self-contained classroom approach to a multi-faceted learning ecosystem. Furthermore, the case studies described here address complexity in the classroom, acknowledging the ‘valley of death’ approach used in transitioning research into practice, and furthering our understanding how innovative technologies only make a difference when deployed and used in line with user needs and requirements (Maughan et. al, 2018).

Students describe how they overcome fear from one’s own comfort zone toward recognising the power of teachers as change agents using an array of community communication platforms to equip and enhance their toolkit with engagement tools tailored for their subject expert domain needs. 

Technology is a critical enabler to access knowledge, resources and people and has empowered those unable to engage with traditional educational settings to gain formal and informal knowledge whilst making learning more fun and engaging alongside other life responsibilities. Education as a career has expanded, teachers, tutors, lecturers, instructional designers, social and community enterprises, data analysts, database architects, facilitators all contribute to a complex education ecosystems that aspire to equality, inclusion and diversity. The population in this study includes diverse educationalists contexts and demonstrates the use of ice-breakers (Eggleston and Smith, 2004). This paper details examples of community building over a number of semesters delivering the same module to different cohorts. It illuminates the difficult induction period whilst students gain trust within small groups and overcome challenges that are presented. The results identify mechanisms that foster a sense of urgency to advocate for change, overcome complacency in classroom and introduce experimentation as a lever to learning in a failsafe ecosystem. Fear is identified as a concept that prevents the use of some technology due to its unpredictability and teacher legacy for being the person at the top of the class with all the knowledge. Times have changed, creativity is key and teachers are realising that they must prepare their students for failure in addition to success and that they need to model experimentation and failure to demonstrate that recovery and problem based learning prevails in a knowledge economy. As educator's compliance is a critical factor to meet the quality standards of our trade, meeting learning outcomes is just one part of the learning journey, gaining trust, delivery of engaging content and the realisation that students need an education ecosystem that promotes a nurture environment, self-actualisation and phronesis.