<br/>Community is an essential part of the human experience. We are social creatures who require connection. The health of our bodies and of our societies depend upon deep and meaningful relationships. However, often in chemistry classrooms developing community is rarely, if ever, considered. As educational scholars have well established, there are foundational supports needed before academic learning can be successful. Mental health, food and housing security, a sense of belonging, the agency to cultivate self-esteem and achieve self-actualization give students the foundations they need to learn successfully. The use of Community Circles can build relationships, give equitable airtime to student’s ideas, and help students to bring their whole selves into chemistry learning spaces. This technique is useful to build a culture of collaboration that can make high impact practices more effective, as well as, creating opportunities for students to relate their own lived experiences to the content to create deeper connections and understanding for all participants. When practiced correctly, the horizontal power structure of Community Circles can help to remove educational barriers, create a more decolonized and anti-racist learning space, and build a starting point where future restorative approaches are possible.<br/>In this presentation the co-authors from Educators Doing Justice will introduce the fundamentals of a Community Circle practice, give several examples of how it can be used in chemistry learning spaces both on-line and in-person, share student reflections of the experience and preliminary data of student success rates by demographic subgroups.

Connecting in isolation: Utilizing community circles to build relationships in online and post pandemic learning spaces: Chemistry edition

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.