Review of "Being a Supportive Presence in Online Courses: Knowing and Connecting with Students through Writing."

Diekelmann, Nancy, and Elnora P. Mendias. "Being a Supportive Presence in Online Courses: Knowing and Connecting with Students through Writing." The Journal of Nursing Education 44.8 (2005): 344-346.

This article appears as part of a regular series, “New Pedagogies for Nursing,” in The Journal of Nursing Education. The authors begin with the premises that online courses are valuable and that being a supportive presence to students is crucial. Teachers may, however, “struggle with how to best know and connect with students from a distance” (344). They argue that writing responses to students is a method of being supportive.

Using a method called Narrative Pedagogy, they use “Concernful Practices” to build relationships with distance students. Narrative Pedagogy requires a “shift in teachers’ attention to language” (344). To substitute for the f2f rapport (voice, expression, chatting), teachers respond in a more personal tone than they might usually do in an academic setting. They couched the academic answer to queries in a friendly and personalized response. “Cutting to the chase” is seen as a temptation to OL efficiency but as detrimental to communication and learning. “Eclipsed communication” may ignore the students’ real concerns and focus on the literal answer (345). Replying to the students’ anxieties may not necessarily be a longer response, but the teacher should focus on the “meanings and significance of their responses” (345). The article offers several examples of student queries and how faculty responded to them using personalized “concernful” messages. These communications let students know they are being listened to as well as simply answered.

Narrative Pedagogy asks teachers to “reflect on how practices, such as knowing and connecting, influence the nature of the experience they co-create with students (345) and to be conscious of how they use language from the students’ point of view.

The article is a useful reminder that our students are an audience – moreover, and audience of whom we are asking cooperation. Building rapport in a regular classroom is often a function of personality, and the article gives pedagogical reasons for allowing personality into our OL environments. The article specifically focuses on one-on-one student interactions and answers to concerns; however, combining these techniques with “Dear Class” letters could prove to be a valuable community building strategy. The article assumes the reader knows what Narrative Pedagogy. I needed to look it up at the US National Library of Medicine and found that it is nursing education specific and “is an approach to thinking about teaching and learning that evolves from the lived experiences of teachers, clinicians, and students.” While “concernful practices” initially sounds rather jargony, the action of mindfully fostering “knowing and connecting” via writing is a useful corrective to the possible impersonality of OL learning spaces. While using theory, the article is brief and is primarily a praxis piece. I would recommend it as refresher in the importance of being “human” with our students both OL and f2f.