Creating academic community during a pandemic

[polly_mer]

Well, the department wants community and I agree that it's a good idea.

Does 'the department' include the second-year students?  What do they say about what kind of interactions would continue the community from last year and welcome the new people to the fold?

Is this a case where a little probing would indicate that the 'community' hasn't been a true community in years?  I remember one sad conversation at Super Dinky where a long-time faculty member asserted the value of the faculty community, but literally everyone she named as valuable members of the community had been gone a minimum of five years.

I wonder if what is remembered as a great community is really more collegial people ready to share free food a few times a semester.  I ask because transferring an established community online with minor modification isn't that hard and you seem to be starting from scratch to establish this community.

[Hegemony]

Not quite sure why you're so adamant that it isn't a community, or can't be, or shouldn't be.  The second-year students are close, but half their cohort is gone (since they were close to the year above them), and this term one will be in Europe and another will be "attending" from out of town.  So they won't be getting together, even in an approved socially distanced way, in person. Normally we'd have a series of events, including a lovely one we had every year to welcome the first-years and launch the year. 

In addition, the students have their own study library (a room in our building with comfy chairs, tables, and many shelves full of books in our discipline), where the students hang out, do their homework, and chat.  It has a coffee machine, a snack basket, etc.  Every grad student has a key to the study library. Apart from that, they have jobs in our program which involve doing work in another large room the department has, working with certain kinds of materials. It's a couple of rooms away from the study library. So if you ever wanted to find the students, you'd stroll down the hall and there would be a group of them working in the workroom or gathered in the study library, or some in each place. This year their work will all be online and isolated, and our building will be closed, so they're definitely not going to be in the study library. The loss of the communal meeting places is going to make a big difference. 

[Caracal]

Not quite sure why you're so adamant that it isn't a community, or can't be, or shouldn't be.  The second-year students are close, but half their cohort is gone (since they were close to the year above them), and this term one will be in Europe and another will be "attending" from out of town.  So they won't be getting together, even in an approved socially distanced way, in person. Normally we'd have a series of events, including a lovely one we had every year to welcome the first-years and launch the year. 

In addition, the students have their own study library (a room in our building with comfy chairs, tables, and many shelves full of books in our discipline), where the students hang out, do their homework, and chat.  It has a coffee machine, a snack basket, etc.  Every grad student has a key to the study library. Apart from that, they have jobs in our program which involve doing work in another large room the department has, working with certain kinds of materials. It's a couple of rooms away from the study library. So if you ever wanted to find the students, you'd stroll down the hall and there would be a group of them working in the workroom or gathered in the study library, or some in each place. This year their work will all be online and isolated, and our building will be closed, so they're definitely not going to be in the study library. The loss of the communal meeting places is going to make a big difference.

Yeah, I don't know why you would be so deluded about the nature of the community but somebody reading a post on a discussion board would be able to see it all so clearly...

Yeah that sucks, a good program culture is often created more by the students than by the faculty and it continues because the more advanced grad students include the new ones in the culture. I agree about seeing if you could get students to take the lead on some of this. They might have a better sense of ways that you could try to recreate at least some semblance of this interaction. Some of the second year students might already be doing things like having occasional zoom chats. I know people who "work together" on zoom. They say hi and chat for a minute, and then do work 45 minutes or an hour and then talk again.