Throughout the semester, we were asked to help build community through participating in our classroom discord, and commenting on the blogs of our peers.

We were reminded a few times to take screenshots and have a trail of our involvement. I… forgot aha and have spent the last couple of hours hunting down and scouring the internet for the comments I left.

I have always struggled with participating in community and helping develop the sense of togetherness that is so important for our health as a community. I’ve read a lot about the topic of community, and spend a lot of my time thinking about it, but in practice I am still very amateur.

I found myself frequently checking the discord and I read many posts by my peers, but the thing I struggled to do was actually become involved and comment and participate in the learning that was ongoing.  I did manage to leave a few comments each week, but I could feel the performativity of these actions instead of a genuine effort to aid and encourage learning.

I have always struggled to feel as though my voice is important and that I have useful thoughts to contribute.  This is something I have improved on immensely over the years, but I’m afraid I still fall short in terms of the expectations people place on me.  I am largely alright with this, but it is hard for me to understand the need to be marked on something I am inherently terrible at.

Here is a link to a Google Doc, where I kept links for the comments I made on posts.

Some ways I helped with the learning of others:

• I participated actively in group discussions during lectures
• I commented on posts on class blogs
• I frequented the discord. Earlier in the semester, I struggled with embedding things and took to the discord to ask for help.  I immediately had multiple people respond to my question with ideas for my problem.  Ultimately, I discovered that what I wanted to do just wasn’t possible, but it was nice to see how ready my classmates were to assist me.

Looking back at my activities through the semester, I do think it is pretty silly how actively I kept up with everyone’s blogs and the discord, but never found it necessary to participate myself.  I think commenting for the sake of commenting feels performative, but I’m guessing that if I had just started, it would have ended up feeling more natural and I would have slowly become more comfortable and learned how to create meaningful discourse.  Practice makes perfect!