Community as "Surroundings" in a Classroom Ecosystem

Clark, R.

In this paper, we preliminarily examine the notion of the “surroundings” in an engineering classroom. We posed an open-ended reflection question to engineering undergraduates at a large US university about their classroom surroundings and its impact on their learning and comprehension. The reflection prompt defined surroundings as the “conditions and objects that surround you.” This reflection question was part of an NSF-funded study on the use of weekly reflection in a flipped fluid mechanics course to drive metacognitive development and lifelong learning skills. During class, students were encouraged to collaborate with their peers during problem solving to achieve collective understanding and interact with the instructor. Based on an inductive, emergent content analysis of the reflection data with two analysts, we obtained an unexpected result. Specifically, the most-frequently mentioned positive classroom “surroundings” was “peers” (46% of responses). We had initially expected less-positive responses related to the physical surroundings, such as classroom layout, size, furniture, infrastructure, etc. Although students identified the classroom’s physical attributes as surroundings that had both negative and positive influences on their learning, a second unexpected positive response emerged with the instructor and in-person instruction as part of the “surroundings.” Upon searching the literature to understand these results, we adopted the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework. This model consists of three interacting components of cognitive presence, social presence, and teaching presence, which enable educational experiences and learning. When combined, the Community of Inquiry elements (i.e., peers, instructor, and in-class instruction) were discussed in 55% of the reflections as positive “surroundings.” Within the classroom ecosystem, feelings about positive CoI “surroundings” balanced 54% of respondents who discussed the physical room attributes as non-supportive to learning. Interestingly, when students identified their CoI as a type of surrounding, they less-frequently identified physical attributes of the classroom as non-supportive. Thus, the presence of a Community of Inquiry may have diminished the perception or impact of physical room features. Overall, our results preliminarily suggest the positive influence that an interactive flipped classroom structure can have on students’ perceptions of their “surroundings.”

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