Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy

Scholars of teaching and learning recognize that interacting with ideas and acquiring skills involve both cognition and emotion. Based on the premise that the social aspects of a class affect a learner’s participation, I argue that informal communication enables students to be thinking and feeling beings and thus is part of building a strong learning community. Teaching online requires us to think differently about communication and how it shapes a learning community. The form and structure of online interactions makes it difficult to curate informal communication that is productive and supports rather than obstructs learning. I draw on my experience teaching 100% online courses and build on the literature about emotion and learning, feminist pedagogy, and online pedagogies to offer a framework for rethinking informal communication in an online learning environment and encourage educators to actively make space for it in their teaching. These moments of informality help a student develop their social presence—or the sense that they are a real person—which is especially important in distance education.