Atmosphere: How will we work and be together?

What is Atmosphere?

The social environment in which students learn, including relationships between faculty and students and among students themselves, significantly impacts learning and motivation. Creating an inclusive climate fosters a sense of belonging and connection to the course, discipline, and a community of learners, making students feel valued and supported. An inclusive climate welcomes students of all identities and backgrounds by validating their assets and helping them connect prior knowledge and skills to new learning (George Washington University, “Inclusive Pedagogy Toolkit: Climate” webpage).

Atmosphere is the combination of social environment and learning culture in which students learn. Also called climate, this aspect of course design asks us to observe, seek to understand, and reflect on the overall feel of social, cultural, learning, and physical interactions learners experience in our courses, and in their other courses and campus social interactions. Atmosphere can be described using the metaphor of temperature, where a warm climate is welcoming, and a chilly climate feels unwelcoming. 

We can also gauge Atmosphere through undergraduate, professional, and graduate student responses to "sense of belonging" queries in engagement surveys in which students identify the importance of feeling comfortable, safe, welcomed, respected, connected, and mattering to peers, instructors, staff and administrators. Vaccaro and Newman (2016) highlight the importance of positive social classroom relationships to students' day-to-day social and learning experiences. 

For minoritized students (those who self-identify with any minoritized identity, not exclusively BIPOC) their experiences of climate can differ significantly from those of white students. For example, minoritized students emphasize safety and respect as crucial elements of belonging, reflecting their inconsistent experiences with these factors. In contrast,  students without minoritized identities describe a positive sense of belonging as feeling comfortable and fitting in. Therefore, it is essential for instructors to notice who finds the climate welcoming or unwelcoming, and under what circumstances, as a foundation for course design.

Reflect on Atmosphere

Atmosphere’s core question -"How will we work and be together?" - is a springboard for our initial course design thinking about how to create cognitive and affective learning interactions to support a broad range of students working on their own or with teachers and peers to learn new concepts, build knowledge, and create original work. A two-eyed reflective process begins with considering where students are - as learners generally and in relation to the focus of your course,  might be guided by the following questions: 

• Who are my students and what have been their experiences? 
• Where are they in their learning processes and where do I want them to be as learners during, after, and beyond this course? 
• What learning skills and needs do they bring to the course, and can share these skills with peers?
• What roles as well as responsibilities will they need to enact to become authentic learners in this course or practitioners in our fields of study and what are the multiple skills of participation our students might enact?
• How will we become mindful of how, when, and when our communication choices, both verbal and non-verbal, can create – or dismantle - supportive and effective learning climates that accommodate the diverse needs and backgrounds of all students, and how might we learn about this from our students?

In reflecting on Atmosphere, we make also make room for two-eyed reflection on we-who-teach:

• Who we have been as learners, and how have we observed our own peers as learners?
• How has teaching been modeled for us, and how might we expand our practices in becoming the sorts of teachers that our disciplines and students need now?
• What have we been taught to believe about how people do or don’t learn, and how might we draw on “Leveraging the Learning Sciences” webpage resources to support learners in navigating the difficulties and excitements they’ll encounter as novice to our fields or to new levels of work in a major program? 
• How will we use our words and tone, facial expressions and visual resources to be transparent about the roles and responsibilities of teachers and of learners in our learning spaces?

Develop Atmosphere Practices

The first subsection that follows will include resources rich in examples that address the what, how, and why of practices that communicate with students that they, and their learning, matter. A second section will serve as a springboard for reflecting on the “Ideal Impact” we hope our courses will have on learners.