Life-enriching online environments for higher education

During and after the pandemic combining approaches to social justice within educational set up become progressively more important. At the BSc Creative Computing we experimented techniques to forging a compassionate educational environment where all people involved belong and can contribute. This includes co-inquiry methodologies and shift of language with the use of a specific non-judgmental framework for communication called Non-violent Communication. NVC was introduced by Mahatma Gandhi (Ziegler, 2014) and developed later by Marshall Rosenberg in the 70s. Marshall Rosenberg is known as a pioneer in nonviolent conflict resolution. In his career he developed and applied NVC for 40 years helping communities, disadvantaged groups, and individuals to focus on partnership, caring and empathy. NVC focuses attention on the feelings and needs motivating each person and what actions might best meet their needs at no one else’s expense (Rosenberg, Eisler 2003). The NVC baseline concept is that “all humans share the same universal human needs” (Rosenberg 2015). NVC has been applied widely in restorative justice (Hopkins, 2012), primary (Jančič 2019) and secondary schools (Hooper 2015) and nursing schools (Nosek 2014, Lee 2016), with measurable results.

The approach led to students’ satisfaction improvement from 50% to 90% during the pandemic. The impact of this approach for the students’ community at UAL touched different but interconnected areas: Students’ agency in the curriculum/assessment, engagement, inclusion, partnership, employability skills and wellbeing. Students become able to evaluate the course with a professional and constructive approach. They created a model of delivery following a cooperative design strategy. This was called “adapted flipped class” and had significant benefits for student inclusion and accessibility to learning material.

We created something bigger than a digital learning environment open to all: a place for peace, change, innovation, justice and equity.