 Welcome everyone to this fourth installment of the Eden series autumn webinars in time of New Normal. We are here today, the 5th of October International Teachers Day, and for this reason I salute all of you, us teachers have been in the front lines of these times, and we have the possibility to be leaders for our communities. It is very important that we remember this when we plan our work. Please write your name and present yourself and the place where you are coming from in the chat area. During this webinar, if you have any questions for our speakers, please write them in the Q&A section. For those of you who are watching us via YouTube, rest assured when you are going to write your question, our colleagues are going to transmit those questions to us and we are going to answer them live here in Zoom. But for people in Zoom, please use the Q&A for the questions you want to ask. I have people from all over the world, I see people from the US, Europe, Asia, so I am very happy that we have a very large international audience. As I said, today is International Teachers Day. In these times, many of the programs and efforts that were being put in place were for students. And sometimes teachers were a little bit neglected, even if tools were provided, support and proper training lacked for many teachers. So even if they are very good at their profession, they find it difficult to teach online in an effective way. That's why it's very important that we are going to talk today about how to get support for all those teachers through communities. And I think it's a very interesting topic and I'm very happy and honored to moderate this. I'm Vlad Mihailescu, I'm the steering committee chair of the NAP, of the Eden Network of Academic Professionals. And I'm coming from Polytechnica University of Timishora in Romania. I have today, besides me, three very involved and dedicated ladies who are game changers in what they are doing in regards to building communities to support teachers. So I'm going to present who the speakers of today's webinar session are. First, Mahabali, associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. And then we have Otom Canes, instructional designer at the University of Michigan, newborn in the USA. And last but not least, we have Mia Zamora, who is associate professor of English and the director of the master's in writing studies and director of the Key University Writing Project in Union, New Jersey, USA. So I'm going to introduce briefly the first speaker for today's session. And this is Mahabali, as I said, coming from Cairo in Egypt. She is an associate professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. She has a PhD in education from the University of Sheffield in the UK, co-founder of VirtuallyConnecting.org and co-facilitator of Equity Unbound. She writes and speaks frequently about social justice, critical pedagogy and open and online education. I saw some of her presentations and I'm very, very eager to hear her now. Maha, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Vlad, and thank you everyone for being here. It's so good to be with you all. I was asking a question in the chat. How are you feeling today? Because I think in this pandemic, it's really important to check in with people. It's really hard for a lot of people. Some days are up, some days are down. I hope this becomes a fun moment in your day because we get kind of zoom fatigue all day. So I hope today turns out to be one of the good hours of your day. What I'm going to be talking about is a particular community building resource that we worked on. Autumn, Mia and I and also a lot of the people who are in the chat participated as well. Irene from Kenya and Katherine from Ireland. And basically what happened is I'm a faculty developer. So my job is to help other professors to teach in general, but of course during the pandemic, how to teach online. And you know, you give them all the basic guidance and then you start to realize a lot of them are saying, building community online is hard. I think it's not possible. So I'm just going to skip it while we're teaching online. And I'm like, no, it's possible. Those of us who have experience with it know that it's very possible. And they think, oh, I could develop student relationship between me and the students, but I can't get the students to do it. And you know, with this pandemic where there's this physical distancing and students are missing the social social aspect and the social emotional aspect more than usual. It feels like this is even more important to emphasize right. And so I was feeling that and hearing this feedback in my own university. And then Autumn and I were in a virtually connecting session. She will explain what that is. And people were talking about that too. And we're like, well, wait a minute. Maybe we should sort of develop resources to help people with that. And what we decided to do is people won't, when you tell them, do it. If they don't see it happening in practice, they can't imagine it. And so we decided to create this resource and we collaborated between virtually connecting equity on bounds, which Mia will talk about. And 1HE, which is just an organization that is about connecting global educators to improve education in general. And we came up with this resource, which someone will type in the chat, I am sure. And I will share my screen. And I just want to ask people who are in the room, has anyone seen this resource before or when you signed up for this webinar? If you have used it before, tell us if you've used any of the resources on it. Because that would be interesting to see and share as well. So it's a site and on it, what we decided to do is we would meet and try an activity together and record the video and also provide text to describe how would you prepare for it. Additional resources like slides or links and adaptations. You have to be asynchronous, how would you do it? If your students don't have their video on how would you do it? If you have students who are particularly shy, how would you do it? Things like that. I'm going to check the chat to see if someone is used it. Thank you, Anna Christina. All right. I would love to hear about particular activities you've used and maybe I can actually show them as well. So after we started doing them, we're like, oh, wait a minute. How are people going to find like they're not more than 30 resources? How are you going to find the one you need, right? So we're like, oh, maybe we need to split them up into introductory activities. Things were ongoing engagement, tips for warming up at the beginning of class and setting the tone. So for example, there's one about annotating your syllabus. I don't know if you guys know Rémy Collier from University of Colorado at Denver. And he talks about how you can make your syllabus into like a Google Doc or even a PDF that people can annotate and ask your students to not only give you feedback on the syllabus at the beginning of the semester, but also in the middle and end of semester. So it's a way to not only invite your students to read your syllabus like how often the students actually read the syllabus, but it also gives them an opportunity to feel like they can actually question certain aspects of it and show you which aspects of it are not clear. And it's very simple how you can go through it and Rémy explains that in the video and gives you examples. Another type of activity is to write an open letter or video to your students. This one I was actually just inspired by someone on Twitter who did one. And I was like, it makes a huge difference to just set the tone that, you know, you want to tell your students how the class is going to be. And then there are some introductory activities like for example, this surrealist free drawing where students kind of draw each other. This was an activity proposed by Autumn and my daughter participated in the activity. And one of the funny things that happened is that Mia's son and my daughter show up in a lot of the videos and we were at first we were like, should we edit this out? And then we're like, you know what, this is how we are. And we discovered a lot of people like this because they feel like we're more human just as they are human. Just as many of us have our children show up in videos and pets and all these kinds of things. So it makes it okay that we do that. And then there are other things that are ongoing types of things that you want to do like just having a third place for community building like a WhatsApp or a Slack channel or something like that. And so we're talking about this one as well. And there's a there's a group of activities called liberating structures. Is anyone here familiar with the liberating structures? You know what they are? We can put the website for that. Can someone put the website? It's just liberating structures.com. And these are activities that face to face are great, but also online or cool. Sort of structure conversations in small groups so that they're equitable and they produce a lot of really interesting outcomes in a very short amount of time. And what happens when you do them online is that this suddenly the thing that you can't do with small groups and suddenly you know what to do with the small groups so that the students don't get lost if you put them in breakouts. And the thing is that in the past you had text descriptions of them but you couldn't see them in practice so you couldn't imagine them. So the videos have been really helpful to create. So Troika Consulting for example is one where students give so you can have students give support to each other when they're they're new to online learning. So what kind of problems are you struggling with with online learning? Let's help each other and the teacher doesn't have to do it. So it's really cool to have that. And then there was some really useful stuff that came out of while we were developing these resources we invited people to give us feedback and to suggest more resources. So some people contacted me they're like oh I have something to contribute and we filmed something with them. Then there are others where someone said oh by the way this could be problematic. One person who wrote for us some safety considerations when we're doing introductory activities that could hurt someone's feelings or be sensitive to someone who has a very special fragile situation. And so we think this is also important. And for example Mace I met filmed one with me about asking students about how is your heart and recognizing that we're all going through trauma right now and some of us are more sensitive and vulnerable than others and talking about that. This resource is to provide support for teachers so that they can be better and feel more confident when they go back to their students. So for me like giving care to teachers so that they can care for their students. And I'm happy to give up the rest of my time for someone else if I still have time. You still have time. I still have time. It's fine let me read through the chat because I wanted to know if people have used it which particular ones they've used. Oh that's so great Sharon to hear that. I've been hearing people are including it in their resource collections. So that's really really good to hear. If people have tried particular ones there is one that I've heard a lot of people liked. It was a story of your name. Ask your students to share the story of their name where it came from. You can choose whichever of their names. And people really like that one. But also at the same time it's a safety. You have to be careful that maybe someone is very sensitive. They have a name change for some reason. For trans people who may not be ready on the first day of class to trust people with sharing their identity for example. So it's really it's very interesting how sometimes some of the best activities can also be very sensitive to certain students. And I don't know if anyone has experience with that. And then some activities are really cool in the sense that they require you to use pen and paper. And it's very interesting when you're online to do something physical or one of the videos is about doing meditation together. And there's other ones that are not published yet. They're about using theatre of the presence only called image theatre where you move your bodies to try to create a portrait in the classroom. So things that usually when you're online you're just sitting like this and you're tense and you're smiling all the time. And then that's not a very comfortable pose. And it's not very realistic to spend your whole life this like everybody's shoulders and necks. You need to stretch because I've been sitting a lot today. So, you know, reminding people to do that kind of thing as well. It's good to see so many friends. I'm going to stop here. And if people have questions they want me to answer, I'll try to do that. Thank you, Maha. This was very interesting and instructive. I'm sure that the people who didn't know about this platform, this community are going to start and take a look on it and use it. I think we all agree we live stressful times as teachers and this support communities come very good, very in hand nowadays. I'm going to move on to our second speaker of this session. And this is Autumn Keynes. She is an instructional designer at the University of Michigan, in the hub for teaching and learning resources, her to which she held professional appointments at St. Norbert College and Capital University. She holds a master's degree in educational technology from the Ohio State University. In the open, she's a co-director of virtually connecting where her work explores questions of presence and spontaneity in synchronous virtual conversations, as well as equity and inclusion in online communities. She also helps to organize and facilitate open connected online events for the purposes of faculty development and her own practice in digital stewardship. So please, Autumn, the floor is yours, and continue with this wonderful discussion about the communities. Thanks so much, Bud. Hi, everybody. My name is Autumn Keynes. As Vlad just said, I'm an instructional designer at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, but I do a lot of work in the open in different communities and one of my most beloved online communities is the virtually connecting group. And I'd like to talk to you about a little bit of the foundations, the start, the history of that community, as well as this idea of intentionally equitable hospitality that was born out of it, which we're now seeing those of us who are very close to that are seeing that we're incorporating that into other communities that we're a part of as well. So is it okay if I share my screen? It says that I can't share my screen while another participant is sharing. So can we take down what we have up right now and then move that over so that I can share? While we're getting that started, I will just go ahead and maybe give you a little bit of the history of virtually connecting. Here we go. I think I can share this one. I think I've got the liberating structures website up right now, but I think I have this in another tab here. We can close this over. There we go. Here we go. This is virtually connecting. And virtually connecting actually started in around 2015 when Meha couldn't make it to a conference that she had been really involved in. So she sat on the board. She had several presentations that were accepted and was very, very involved in this conference. And then at the last minute, because of all, I mean, she lives in Cairo. The conference was in the United States. There were a lot of logistics that had to go on to make it happen and it wasn't going to happen. There was just too many other things going on. And our other colleague, Rebecca Hogue, said, well, I'm actually going to that conference. How about if I brought you there? I have a phone. We have Google Hangout at the time was what we used. And you can sign in and I'll take you around to the conference. Not so much for the sessions. Meha was actually working with the conference organizers to have them bring her into the sessions that she was supposed to present in. But she was like, you know, I'm going to miss out on the community aspect. I'm going to miss out on those hallway conversations, having coffee with people, bumping into people that you've only known in those online spaces. And so that's how virtually connecting was sort of born. But as that, you know, event happened and was successful, there was this idea, could we do this on a larger scale? Because there's all kinds of equity problems with conferences. When we talk about faculty communities of support or faculty development communities, conferences are a huge place where that happens. We gather together at these conferences to learn from one another, to present on the things that we've been working on and the thinking that we've been doing. And so communities come out of that. And quite often those even spill over into subject areas or they spill over into these SIGs or listservs or things like that. But the actual ability to go to the conference itself is incredibly resource intensive. It takes a lot of money. Registration fees are very, very expensive. The travel is expensive. Lodging is expensive. So we continued for a couple of years organizing little hallway conversation events at these physical conferences where we would advertise that we were going to be having these conversations and invite people who couldn't come to these events for whatever reason to be a part of the conversation with us. And we found that there were a lot of folks who maybe had other obligations. Maybe they are parents or they had parents themselves that they were caring for. They were a caregiver of some kind and so leaving to go to another state or another country or another province or something like that, it just really wasn't in the cards for them. They couldn't afford to. Maybe they're graduate students, things like that. And so we were able to bring in to the conference voices and build what I like to think of as really a hybrid community. So we like to think about faculty learning communities, support communities as either these face-to-face things that happen out of our Centers for Teaching and Learning or things that happen in conferences or now especially things that are happening online. But what was really interesting I think about virtually connecting is that it's a hybrid, right? We're taking something that's happening in a face-to-face environment that's very locally centered. And we're inviting people from all over the globe to come and be a part of that. What is particularly interesting about that environment is that the power dynamics that are involved are all over the place. So we are inviting people who are at the conference who are presenting sometimes even keynote speakers or organizers of the conference who have a lot of social capital, who have a lot of, you know, social abilities inside of these spaces who often have a lot of resources because they're maybe further on in their career and they just have more money to be able to be in these spaces together with people who can't, right? And so with these power dynamics being all over the place, we're trying to juggle and make sure that we're being hospitable to everybody in the room. That's a tricky space to be in. And we heard a lot about the type of hospitality that we were giving in these spaces, which I'll say is messy. These are messy spaces. When we start talking about how we ensure that somebody feels welcome in a space, I think it's really hard to make sure that somebody feels welcome in a space. I think the best that we can do is offer and try to, you know, do simple things like learning names and, you know, learning who people are, spending time to listen to them. But we can never guarantee that somebody's going to feel welcomed. What we can do is offer our hospitality to them. I think when we start trying to guarantee hospitality, then we get into some trouble. So here in the United States anyway, the hospitality industry is something that I've had experience with. So when I was younger, that was something that was offered to me as maybe a career path. I didn't end up taking that career path, but very much has a mentality of the customer is always right. And there's a certain etiquette and a certain protocol to hospitality that you have to run through. And if you do that, then you've done your hospitality work, right? And we really rejected that. We did not want to think of hospitality as something that was a protocol or something that was an etiquette or something that you would do a checkbox that everything would work out because really each person who comes to a different environment, be those social groups, be those virtual environments, be those physical environments, that person brings their unique experience to that stage. And without making time to recognize that and try to approach that from an equitable standpoint, we think that you will, we found that you would run into some troubles. And so through years of doing this virtually connecting, a bunch of us who did it on a pretty regular basis got together to write this article called Intentionally Equitable Hospitality and Hybrid Video Dialogue, The Context of Virtually Connecting. And I can pop that into the chat really quickly. Oh, somebody else already did. Perfect. Thank you. And what we're doing here is really making the point to pay attention to who is in the room. Making a point of realizing who has the power and who has most voice in other spaces and giving an opportunity for those who don't have such an opportunity to have their voices heard, giving them a space where they can do that and giving them a space where we are going to listen to them and receive that in a welcoming way. And again, I don't think that you can force somebody to feel welcome. Right? You need to feel welcome now. I did these five things and I'm sure it is not going to really work, but I do think that hospitality comes more naturally and comes more organically when you do think about things from a space of equity and you try to give voice to those who quite often don't get a chance to speak and to be heard. So if it's okay, Vlad, I don't know where we're at with timing, but I wouldn't mind maybe stopping there and turning things over to Mia to talk about how this then gets applied in some other contexts. Thank you, Autumn. I just want to say I feel very welcome in this webinar. So that means all of you are doing a very good job and I'm sure the rest of the participants are feeling welcome. As Idan has shown in the past weeks, we are presenting different topics each week and I think this topic of support for teachers is a very important one. That's why I'm very happy to introduce our next speaker and this is Mia Zamora. She's an associate professor of English, the director of the master's program in writing studies and the director of the Keen University writing project in Union University, USA. She has recently received the Keen University professor of the year award. Her commitment to equity, digital interests, data rights and intercultural understanding is clear in both her scholarship and leadership work. She has founded several global learning networks including Equity Unbound and Network Narratives and was co-chair of ALT's OER20 conference on care in openness. Mia, please, the floor is yours. Thanks for the introduction, Vlad. And I just want to say thank you to my two colleagues for sort of setting up our conversation. I have a feeling we'll have a really robust and interesting Q&A. I also think it's quite serendipitous that it's a special day today, a day for celebrating teaching and thinking about our practice together is the best way to celebrate that. And I figured I'd take my little bit of time to share another angle of the same story in a way. So Autumn was just talking about intentional, equitable hospitality and how difficult it is to sort of hit that note quite right. And so what I'd like to do is start with just telling you a bit of a story about the network equity unbound, how it was founded, and what kind of work we've done and how that sort of led to the projects that were featured here today, in particular the community building resources that Maha shared out. So I'm going to share my screen now and just simply take us to the front of the, excuse me, the front of the, sorry, I'm just getting the right window open. The front of the equity unbound website and I'm sure one of my colleagues will throw in the link to equity unbound overall into the chat. But I wanted to explain to all of you what equity unbound is, first of all. It's a network, it's a community, it's friends, it's co-learners, it's collaborators coming together online to do specific kinds of work, work that is equity focused, it's open, it's connected, and it focuses on intercultural learning experiences across classes, across countries, across contexts. The founding story goes a little bit like this. It was the end of my own sabbatical experience at the University of Bergen in Norway, and I was getting ready to return home from the wonderful Norway to the conflict fraught U.S. with a bit of anxiety and had a nice call and conversation with two colleagues that I admire very much, Maha and Katherine Cronin, who happens to be with us today in the webinar here. And we spoke about how to move the kind of work that we feel most convicted about, most strongly about, most passionate about, which is this idea of equity and also intercultural understanding. How can we move that forward in any productive way? And we came up with the idea that maybe we just think about some of the productive activities that we do online and find ways to do them across seas and across cultures in a way that also opens up possibilities for others who are out there that might be interested in coming along on that ride. So the three of us founded Equity Unbound. And since then, we've had several iterations of this work over time. You know, it's going into the third year now, and we have many other participants, contributors, and some people dip into the work simply for one particular activity that works within their classroom context, that they feel really matches up beautifully with what they're trying to do in their own curriculum. And then other times there are people who are paired up throughout the majority of a course. So there's, you know, several activities that we do collaboratively in some way. Sometimes we have things called studio visits where we invite other scholars, other colleagues to come in and have timely conversations about issues we're all grappling with together. And we have a lot of asynchronous activity online. All of this, by the way, done mostly on the social media side of Twitter. We have a handle there and we have a hashtag, et cetera. So we're exploring digital literacies, equity, intercultural learning focus in an open and connected way online. That's the work of Equity Unbound. And so that's our origin story. We're just, we're continuing to grow and we're even moving into what we feel is at the heart of our work as well. Just a quick mention of our current project, which is imagining a socially just academia. And we're launching a particular project this coming week on, I mean, this Friday. It's a webinar that all of you are invited to, if you're at all interested in these issues. But it's an open network, long-term project, which will be a series of listening sessions, conversations, workshops. And we're going to work on dismantling oppression and promoting decolonial and anti-racist practices in academic institutions, research practice, our curricula, and our teaching practices. This is, of course, a huge and ambitious project, which is under the umbrella of our general equity equity Unbound work. But all of it is side by side in many ways, in part because, in essence, sorry, wrong window, in part because all this work is prongs of the same thing. It's prongs of the same values that we work together on. So now I'm going to stop sharing for a little bit and just talk to just a brief bit more about pedagogies of care and the theory of care behind our overall work. We think together all the time about what it means to work in the open in a way that invites and makes everyone feel as comfortable as possible. Also being extremely self-reflective about the limits of that work or the constraints around that work. So a couple of things I just value is that I wanted to kind of extend a little bit or foreground here. One of the things I think is key or a cornerstone of what we do is thinking about ourselves as co-learners. Much of our work in university in higher ed is about professionalizing, gaining degrees, gaining expertise, gaining mastery. And along the way, we assume and take on certain forms of authority because we've worked hard to get there. And yet at the same time, we are also mentoring and bringing along all the time young learners who will one day also have a little bit more of a kind of platform to stand on, to share ideas and to share work. And inherently in that sort of progression and hierarchy of academic work, there is this sense of, well, just that, like a hierarchy and an issue of power, right? The teacher knows better and the students listen quietly and perhaps passively at whatever content they need to master. But we're interested in a more complex environment for learning than that kind of staid and static context, one that has in many ways extended certain forms of injustice for a very long time. So co-learning, just sit side by side with your students as equals on a kind of journey that you're designing together is not an easy move to make as a professor. That's precisely what we're trying to, or as a teacher. But that's precisely the space that we're trying to sort of work in and think about and extend in many ways. So the one H.E. in many ways is a showcase of some of the infrastructural and teaching moves that we make. We think about like kind of gestures and moves and strategies to produce a co-learning environment. One H.E. in many ways is a tribute to that idea of co-learning. I also want to talk a little bit about collaborative design. That is sometimes when we go about planning or teaching that will roll out for our students, we're sort of master designers sort of working behind the scenes and understanding quite all the like threads and machinations of what we want to roll out. Co-designing in collaboration, it's an extension of co-learning in some ways is also a hard space to work in, but one that we're constantly thinking about. Basically I guess in digital speak that might be things like crowdsourcing, having third spaces for everyone who's involved with learning to speak both synchronously but also asynchronously about the work. But also I think it's very important to bring your students voices into whatever production is ongoing in the course. In online learning in particular, I think we have a lot of opportunity. As an example of what I mean, just one simple example is that I syndicate all of the blog posts of my students into the course websites that I designed for my courses because I want the students to have a kind of flow of community conversation that's ever present so that the course website isn't something the professor has made for them as much as it's something we're always making together. So that notion of collaboration as an important value is something I wanted to bring to the foreground today. I also want to briefly talk about metacognition. What does that mean? It means a little bit that what you practice is also what you're theorizing in a way. And we do this often as colleagues and it's sort of a fun thing. Even when we're planning out things together and our planning workshops, we're also working through the liberating structural paradigms that we're actually modeling. So it's this meta experience of being reflected at the same time that we're taking something into action and sharing it and modeling it at the same time. So that instinct is really important, I think, in the work we do. Finally, I guess the last thing I want to emphasize and then we'll close it out and have a Q&A in a short bit. But the last thing I want to talk about is the importance of creativity in teaching and learning. Inviting your students to do fun things, to be playful. In the community building resources, there's a few activities we could highlight and one that I'm thinking of just off the top of my head right now that would fall into a creative space is something like the surrealist self-portraits and I think Autumn and Mahah and Hoda who is Mahah's daughter did showcase that work. But in essence, it's trying to do a self-portrait with the non-dominant hand. So if you're right handed, then to draw yourself in one minute with your left hand, et cetera. But this becomes a kind of way to introduce yourself to others by explaining what happened and what you were trying to capture, et cetera. But that's a very creative way to open up a sense of connection in your classroom rather than saying I'm a computer science major with interest in writing and I'm a third year student at the American University of Cairo. That's another way to introduce a student to introduce themselves but it might not have the same kind of impact in getting to know someone as having a playful assignment and then a quick round robin discussion in how that went. You remember a lot more about a person when you have this kind of creative moments inserted into your classrooms. So creativity is important and I want to say that I think at the heart of creativity is something even more powerful. The formal word for it is epiphania. That's a, you know, throw out an SAT word. Epiphania is when you make these connections that are not necessarily in any way related. But you see something that's disparate but you understand in some way how it's connected together. And so I think a lot of what we do in our connected learning work is to sort of expand that notion of epiphania in powerful ways to make connections that are not apparent but in some ways move our work, move our intentions, move our sense of empowerment forward in beautiful ways. So I just wanted to end my comments with those are some of the values that we take into this work as a team, as a network, as a community and the global 1HE resources that are for community building are built in that spirit, virtually connecting as a professional a professional organization that's connecting people on varying hierarchical scales, you know, in terms of their professional development, it brings people together for meaningful and powered conversations and then of course equity and bound which reaches towards curricular activities and co-learning in an intercultural environment in the open web but also is doing activist work to expand our sense of what it means to teach and learn to perspectives that are not necessarily listened to in the past have been marginalized, have been pushed aside. So in a way, that's an activist wing that we're pursuing there. All of this stuff that we mentioned today is all bound together in a nice sort of environment or milieu that we're deeply and truly excited to share with you and hopefully now we can talk about it more through question and answers. Thank you. I just want to say that Niki Spaulding has joined us and Niki is our 1HE partner. We send her stuff and then she makes it happen on the website and she organizes it and she makes it perfect. So welcome Niki and thank you so much for your work on this. Hi Niki and talk about beautiful design. Niki's got that down. Thank you, Mia. I would kindly ask participants to write down their questions in the Q&A section for our speakers. I love that you emphasized in the end on creativity and I think this is very important nowadays because many teachers are not... they don't know how to be more creative on the online. It's not that they don't want to and how can we get more creative if we are only alone? So we need this collaboration. We need these networks so that we can get another perspective and getting another perspective helps us become more creative. I have one question from the YouTube channel from Michael Schneider and he asks about the 1HE. He says it seems you need to log in to access the resource. Maybe it is not open. Maybe Maha, if you can... Which resource is not open? The 1HE? It's open. They might have put www. Just let them take the resource that should work. It's open. Someone could copy it and paste it in the YouTube. Let me just share my screen quickly so they can see the URL at the top. See this one over here. There is no www. I think sometimes people put a www and that will give them a login screen. Just don't put it there. It's also equity dash on bound. Maybe someone put an underscore. Or if they just put one word it's not going to work. Actually all the videos are also on the virtually connecting YouTube channel which I posted here. But if the people are watching on YouTube they won't find that playlist either. So if someone could just take it and put it on YouTube for people who are watching on YouTube that would help. I'm sure our colleagues from Secretariat will help with that. Until we get some more questions from participants I have a question so we saw that the challenges we are facing are the same all over the world. We have here a very international group of panelists from a lot of continents and we are facing the same challenges. I'm asking as a teacher maybe a hands on question how can I best find the group where to fit in your platforms. Can I get a more localized group to talk with from my area? That's a good question. So one of the things we're thinking about with the new project with the Social Adjusted Academia is that we want to provide a forum for people to come and think about what they want to do locally. As they come to us to get ideas for how to do things then go back locally and find people locally to do it because not everyone locally will want to be joining those online spaces. This is one of the tricky things is that if you want people locally you don't usually go online to find them. You find local spaces even local online mailing lists or things like that to be able to find them. So this is what I would say you might sometimes of course bump into someone local in an online space and it does happen sometimes but I would say for the most part come and learn about how to build these learning communities and then take that learning and apply it locally and I would say and that can sometimes be lots of local spaces also interconnecting later. That's my first thought on that. I can mention another project that I'm involved with that we call Digpins and it's digital, it's an acronym it's kind of like a short, it's kind of like an abbreviation and an acronym put together so the ditch is an abbreviation for digital and then pins is an acronym for pedagogy identity networks and scholarship and what we do there is we encourage people to make small local communities at their schools so Meha has run a cohort I've seen Joe Murphy in the chat there he ran a cohort at Kenyon College but we all come together at the same time we run sort of the same readings and the same activities at the same time and each group has their own local space as well as a larger space where we can all come together and I don't like to make things digitally specific or technologically specific but I'll say we use synchronous chat environment so something close to like an IRC chat Slack Microsoft Teams something like that so that way you have a way to quickly kind of message each other but also have longer form longer form ways of processing some of the things that we're talking about the things that we're reading the conversations that we have through blogging for instance and so I think there is a rich there's rich soil there in terms of creating local cohorts that then work together to have a larger conversation with a community of cohorts it's not perfect community is always kind of messy right but I do I'm very passionate about that and I think that there is real I think that there's real potential there but I think it starts through having this goes back I think a little bit to virtually connecting so a big thing that made virtually connecting work is that we had an onsite coordinator who we called an onsite buddy and a a virtual coordinator that we called the virtual buddy and each of these folks kind of work together well the same thing with ditch pins all of the local coordinators who are running cohorts at their schools we kind of have our own little sub community where we're talking to one another as well so I really think it comes down to a bit of a layering of you know different coordinators people who are really paying attention to that hospitality piece making sure that people feel heard making sure that people's voices are being recognized and one person can't do it all right and so having at least two people who can be in communication with one another to help organize and pay attention to hospitality I think is key. Thank you for that answer I see that we have also a question in the Q&A but before you have a chance to read it I want to ask you another question we know that many people are attending webinars but they are afraid to join communities and we talked a lot about equity people are afraid that maybe they don't speak very good foreign language they are afraid they don't know anyone they are afraid maybe they don't have the necessary digital skills how can you encourage these people these teachers to join these communities no matter the lack of skills the lack of language the barrier of language first of all you are also describing some structural issues so there are valid concerns so some of the things we are doing we did with virtually connecting especially at first is that for example there is a lot of people we say participate in whatever way you feel comfortable so at first people were watching on YouTube and then they would join so they don't have to want to if you want to type your questions sometimes it's not their first language it's easier for them to type it because it gives them more time to think so they can do that and the facilitator reads it out loud to make sure the other people notice it so the spaces themselves have to allow for this diversity of participation so not everyone has to participate fully in order to be part of the community so I can understand if someone the other thing is it really helps if there's someone who can mentor you through and help you get into a space so if you know one person who is very active online that person can help you through it so for example if I tell people oh you can find good things on Twitter then I as a mentor what I do is if they have a question I tag them on Twitter and tell them here are some people who can help you and ask that person to help introduce you to others it is very difficult to go to a space that is interesting to go up to someone you don't know or go into a crowd and no matter how friendly they are it would look like a click that you can't enter I think that's a valid concern to have so if you find one person in your community or someone that you do know who can help you through it I think that is really really important and the question about the environment and your work not supporting you feel isolated for me it's joining the online spaces this is what keeps me going to be honest because you can find people who are as specialized in the thing that you are with your same interests and then you bring that back to your work and show them oh look what I've been learning it's very difficult especially for people whose work it is to support other people they are usually the one or two people in their whole university sometimes doing that work yeah no I just wanted to echo what you're saying and just add a little of my own experience there some of the time I feel like institutional the context for our institutional work is sort of more constrained than the kinds of things we feel we can accomplish and also in terms of time in terms of like breath of our work etc it's different when we look outside and look openly that has been a certain engine in all honesty in my own career is that when I feel frustrated in a particular local situation then I just make sure I keep continuing to grow and do and listen and participate in context outside and then I bring it back in so as an example Sandra I think you might have asked this question or you were asking it for someone else but whomever to whomever asked this question one of the things that I'm doing now in terms of our new launch project of imagining a socially just academia is that I've been asked to chair the diversity inclusion and equity work within my university so that's a big job right but there's all kinds of local politics involved but I'm sort of leveraging my listening my design my interest my collaboration with the outside network in order to think of the best way to take what's needed in my local context and make it move further and it's not always a good it's not always an equal match there's sort of a kind of translation issue a little bit you have to sort of see what's on the ground and what you can move along on the ground versus what you can do in open spaces that's that are different but I think it's a really good question that's being asked you know how do we do this work both in our immediate communities but then also in a broader sense it's actually like an issue of calibration a little bit but I do leverage one for the other and vice versa in order to understand things better and to get more done thank you ladies for these answers we have one question in the Q&A from Catherine Cronin and she's asking if you can say a bit about the mutual support and strength that this work can provide as a community network of educators because many educators are feeling overwhelmed right now and I can totally agree with this so if you can please okay I'm gonna have to leave speaking of being overwhelmed I have to leave in two minutes because I have something else that I have to attend I think there are spaces that you go to that help promote your well-being and there are spaces you go to that make you more tense if any of these things in this traumatic time make you feel tense then that's not the right space for you and even if a lot of other people are enjoying it or like it or find it welcome if it doesn't feel welcome to you I wouldn't force myself to do it like try it once or twice ask a friend who enjoys it to take you with them ask friends for recommendations for spaces and also you know find spaces where you can take something and adapt it rather than have to do a lot of work when you're overwhelmed and I'll leave it to me to continue this because I have to thank you everyone thank you Maha for being with us today and let's see if Mia or Atom want to give an answer we cannot hear you okay I'll just weigh in a little bit more on that and say when we founded equity unbound some two or three years ago we thought that it was about expanding our work for our students in many ways we were interested in kind of growing a community and thinking about the ways in which our students can become sort of digitally literate globally networked learners that's what we were thinking of as our first set out the gate but what actually ended up happening is that these this network became our solace it became our place to you know work through things that were stressful so in a way it also became a very enriching professional development space and that was a bit unforeseen so we actually wrote about this a team of equity unbound educators wrote about this recently about well-being and self-care and the need for spaces where we can be heard and listened to in ways that are enriching that we can also then bring back in some way so it's a surprising thing to I guess said more simply we find friendships anew in some of these networks and spaces that give us the strength to keep going with the work that we know is important etc so I guess it's all about that idea of well-being just as Maha said and navigating that thoughtfully and being in spaces that support you for real and not just drain you thank you Mia I think we have time for one more question which Autumn receives you already answered so the question is if you have any experience of using the techniques for making people feel welcome with people who are a little bit more resistant please Autumn yeah so the thing to remember as well is that not everybody is joining these spaces of their own volition right sometimes people are forced to be part of a community with our students we see this all the time with required classes so if you've ever taught a class where students like an introductory class that's a requirement for students it can be very painful but even our creating communities of professional development for faculty sometimes they're told that they have to come into these spaces and that can be very a very problematic space again I don't think that you can force anyone to feel welcome it just defeats the purpose of it you will feel welcome now it's not going to work right but yes I think it's trying to get those folks on board with that bigger picture so why is this course a requirement why is this professional development experience a requirement and if you can get them on board with that you can lessen that to some degree outside of that I think it's really just empathizing with them about the fact like yes I know it's a requirement I'm sorry I don't want it to be a requirement either but you know while we're here together as a community in this space how can we make this the best experience that we absolutely can for everybody involved I think that's another technique that can be used to maybe make those spaces a little bit more hospitable and I personally try to advocate to lessen those kind of experiences especially when it comes to faculty development I would rather give a large breath of different options have several different types of communities with different focuses I partner with faculty so later today I'm actually going to be part of a faculty learning community that's called teaching with tablets where folks who teach with tablets who have iPads and Android tablets those kind of things and who teach with them get together and just have social hour and have conversation about that we have another one called Digped at Dearborn which is headed up by another faculty member so try to find those faculty who are passionate about those things and let them kind of be the focal point for those communities I've had success with that and I can't guarantee that it would be successful in all environments but I think that that can be helpful too thank you autumn for this great answer we have one more question in the Q&A actually from is there anywhere an overview of this fantastic community platform so that teachers can easily find the one they fully love with I'm guessing other community platforms rather than the links we already shared in the chat if one of you too can answer this one if you go to the equity unbound website then in there you will find a link to the one HE community building resources you'll also find a link to the imagining a socially just academia community it's all sort of umbrella there except for virtually connecting which is also inherently involved with all of this but I think there's less of an access point there so but if you just type in virtually connecting you'll find that as well Catherine thank you for putting the link to equity unbound in the chat so that one you can get to global the one HE global community building resources and this imagining a socially just academia and also just curricular activities that are happening in here and now the semester that are open and they might be of interest to you the virtually connecting is also now in the chat and that is the network is very connected it's not featured in equity unbound but probably should be and it's something for us to actually think about and thank you autumn also for including didge pins which is another wonderful resource so at least it's all there at the bottom of the chat thanks for the question please autumn I'll just really quickly add that these kind of connected communities pop up all over the place it seems like and I actually don't know of a good hub for them outside of the things that we've mentioned today it just seems like there are things that are happening all the time I think being active in social media spaces like Twitter is a big one for me I met a lot of folks through Twitter paying attention to some of the organic MOOCs that pop up not those Coursera MOOCs I mean those are great too but I'm thinking about more like the CL MOOC that Mia was a part of and those kind of things can be a great way to make connections and I really find that these things just kind of organically grow and pop up through through mutual friendships that are built that we talked about earlier thank you for those very good outputs before we close this session I want to ask you one final question for the both of you so if you could now in these times after all this discussion about the communities offer one piece of advice only one piece of advice for all the teachers that are listening to us right now what would that advice be whichever of you wants to start you are not coming through Mia there we go okay now it's working that's a really hard question I guess the first thing that came to mind was remember the power of listening because I think that we're so busy sometimes trying to get across things that we don't pay attention as much as we should to those who we are learning with so remember to listen and to you know create an environment in which listen active listening is something that you're modeling and that and sometimes listening means you know making sure they know that you really read what they wrote making sure that you pause and you think about things before you cut something off and move ahead with content that's what I thought of at first there's so many things but that's the first thing I thought of really hard that is a really hard question I'm gonna go I'm gonna go with be mindful and creative in your uses of technology don't be afraid of it you're not gonna break it even if you do that's fine even if you do break it that can be very lightning as well but don't just stick to the basics think about how you can use it in creative ways think about ways that you can use it that are maybe a little bit unconventional and be gentle with yourself and with your students thank you ladies those were very good pieces of advice I would I will risk and also offer one piece of advice for myself I remind you that today is teachers international day and I was saying that we can all have the potential of being the leader we have the potential of leading our community so that's my advice be a leader for your community in these challenging times I want to thank everyone for participating in this webinar especially for our three wonderful speakers who offered us their very warm opinions about the teacher community for teachers and I would like to remind you that next week we are going to have a webinar an Eden webinar about the research workshop which is going to happen from the 21st to the 23rd of October and the registration is still open until next Monday so feel free to register I hope I'm going to see you at the next webinars of Eden thank you ladies thank you participants and have a very nice day