This episode provides four ways to reflect on making group work more accessible. It provides suggestions on aspects to add to group work design to support learners and points to the possibilities of group work beyond simply meeting a learning outcome.
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Transcript for Episode 19 Accessible Group Work
Resources Connected to the Episode
Niagara College Accessibility Hub on Accessible Group Work
McPherson, Elaine; Collins, Trevor and Gallen, Anne-Marie (2019). Enabling inclusive group work. Proceedings of the 12th annual International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation (ICERI 2019)
Hi, great tips! I am wondering about the most accessible and trauma-informed way to assign group members. Often, instructors tell students to create their own groups, which could be empowering, but more often than not it creates a lot of anxiety for students. “Not being asked” is hurtful, and often those already in the margins stay in the margins… thoughts?
Hi Helena, Thanks for the great question! As I noted in the episode, I try to do a best of both worlds approach to group formation. The first part is the empowering part by having learners select topics or concepts they want to work on themselves. Then I form the groups based on the topics that they have individually identified as what they want to work on. So if 4 people want to do topic 1, for example then those 4 people are part of one group etc. This helps with some of the anxiety as learners select topics and concepts that are not activating, and more often than not topics that are meaningful to them, or that can be critiqued or informed by their lived experience. It can work for smaller classes and larger classes, because even if you have 20 learners who like topic 2 and 30 learners who like topic 3, you can still separate them up into 5 groups for topic 2 and 6-7 groups for topic 3 etc. It also can support that marginalized learners piece you note here, because often the groups that will be formed will be more diverse as they are informed by topics and concepts they want to work on, as opposed to topics and concepts that someone has assumed they should work on. I hope this helps clarify a bit, and thanks again for the great question.