With a group of 84 students in business communications over 4 different classes it was a rough start. In fact, this was the roughest semester start I had ever been part of. Not because of ABRP and not because of a lack of orientation, in fact the orientation had been the most attended and successful we had possibly ever rolled out, but because these students were not settled. First semester first year? Always a little unsettled but we normally get there pretty quickly. The nonsense games we play in class, the discussions and the goofiness I bring to the first forays into the communications class normally let us get productive quickly. This semester there were too many students who I could not get through to, there was no wave of understanding and creativity for them to also jump on. So many of them just stared at me or each other blankly.
It started to become clear that many students were in class to recover from something else and just to sit and it turned out they were mainly seeking shelter from homelessness. At least 1/4 of the students did not have settled housing. At one point I had two students in my class with all their belongings with them in the classroom. One had spent most of the night at McDonalds until someone who had a room in the dorms let her sleep on their floor. When she was found out she was told she could not do that again. She had all her belongings with her in my class because she hoped to find a place that evening after doing the obligatory class attendance with me. After my class, college staff dropped her off at the homeless shelter. Not cool. So not cool. All this to say, it took us so long to get started. The normal warm ups and writing assessments were just such a slog and so my very democratic idea of how we would choose a research topic just became more around which class was most manageable and had the least amount of students and they chose our topic for al the other classes too. The very obvious homelessness issue was nominated and the other classes agreed to conduct research and attempt to answer the question:
How do we solve the housing crisis in Terrace BC?
Turns out we don’t do it by not explaining what research is. Lesson learned – some students don’t even know what research is. Never mind walking them through the steps. They just need the definition. A better introduction with examples is needed if we embark on this again. Maybe just a better instructor would be helpful honestly but here we are now.
How did it work?