Walking the Walk: The Bok Center's Efforts to Sustain Community in a Remote Work Environment

May 15, 2020
zoom call with Bok staff wearing matching knitted scarves

During the initial, headlong rush toward online teaching in March, nearly every conversation we had with the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates with whom we work focused on the twin challenges of maintaining continuity and community. Whether we were facilitating faculty workshops, organizing graduate student Zoom trainings, or compiling and writing materials for our new Teaching Remotely website, this focus on continuity and community was at the core of what our partners wanted and what we wanted to help them achieve. Fortunately, here at the Bok Center we had the perfect “laboratory” at our disposal: our own vibrant community of staff and fellows, which includes at any given time well over one hundred people of varying ages, university roles, and extracurricular interests. What could we learn from our efforts to sustain our community here at the Bok Center, challenged as we were by the onset of quarantine and the unprecedented amount of support we were offering to instructors and students?

Over the past nine weeks we’ve experimented with ideas big and small, synchronous and asynchronous, to sustain the community that forms the foundation of the Bok Center’s support for constituencies around campus and beyond. Even before the pandemic, our team was split between two offices, which gave us the opportunity to see firsthand the importance of fostering both spontaneous interaction and regular meetings in order to remain connected. In addition to starting more frequent “stand-up” staff meetings, we looked at other features of our shared, day-to-day work to see what adjustments we could make for the new circumstances.

The Bok Center uses Slack as both a communication and project management tool, and as we moved off campus, we added two new Slack channels: one focused on news about Coronavirus related to higher education, and a second channel, #covid-coping, to help us maintain our interpersonal relationships and surface ways in which we could cultivate resiliency in a difficult time. In addition to sharing humor, recipes, and photos as we work from home, Program Coordinator Dani Duke regularly posts questions for Bok staff.  We’ve enjoyed sharing everything from our favorite movies to the hypothetical titles of the TED talks we would give if asked, all of which have contributed to morale throughout the long hours we’ve been putting in helping others. Given the central role of motivation in student learning, it could be well worth dedicating a Slack channel and/or a little bit of time in your course to such community-building activities, giving students another way to bond in the absence of face-to-face encounters on campus.

Other features of our Bok community proved equally valuable as “incubators” for new ideas about online teaching. As we know, many instructors in performance- and making-based courses have been wondering how best to teach the kinds of skills at the center of their courses through Zoom. Can the kind of intimate, in-person instruction that happens in a practice room or art studio translate to a webcam? Enter “Crafty Lunch,” a group of Bok crafters that met weekly prior to COVID-19. The group has continued to meet over Zoom for crafts and conversation, and some members just completed the same knitting project, developing along the way greater insight and fluency with the ways in which making can move online. We’ve likewise managed to continue our tradition of Bok Happy Hours online, migrating our snacks and beverages from the Learning Lab to a Zoom room. One of the lessons learned from the experience is the importance of creating structure when socializing online; most recently, we have experimented with team-based trivia using various formats and breakout rooms. We’ve had to clarify our own rules about whether these “exams” are open or closed book; luckily, we are comfortable having those conversations!

Our experimentation with ways to cultivate and maintain our team while working remotely directly informs our work with faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. In experiencing firsthand what works and what doesn’t quite hit the mark, we can better help teachers consider strategies for their classroom communities, and develop ways to sustain our communities of students and faculty based at the Bok Center.