Is N E 1 There? Designing and Building Community Within/Across Classrooms and Institutions

Fore, Melissa, Margaret M. Strain, and Kara Moloney. “Is N E 1 There? Designing and Building Community Within/Across Classrooms and Institutions.” Webbing Cyberfeminist Practice: Communities, Pedagogies, and Social Action. Kristine Blair, Radhika Gajjalaand, Christine Tulley. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008. 185-206.


This article is an account of a research project regarding online communities undertaken by three researchers at two different institutions. In order to conduct their study, Strain, Fore, and Moloney designed a six-week writing unit in their classes “that combined selected essays on electronic communications to contextualize our focus on community-building and inform the correspondence among the students” (187). The researchers asked such questions of their students as how they defined community, how community can exist amongst people who may never meet, and how they conceptualized terms like “cyberself” and “cyberidentities.” Beyond what they learned about students’ ideas regarding such topics, the researchers also discuss the community-building that took place through a variety of face-to-face and electronic communications amongst the three researchers themselves.

This article is interesting and highly relevant to my exploration of electronic pedagogy as it relates to writing and community-building in online classrooms. The most useful components of this article include the discussion of this study as an example of feminist research methods (something in which I am very interested) and the responses of the students in question. The least useful component of this article is the fact that it seems to focus so much more on the community-building and problems of the group of researchers than it does on the students. I would not necessarily argue that this article delivers what the title seems to promise: useful information regarding building and designing community in the classrooms. At least it would seem that information along these lines is more than a little eclipsed by the authors’ accounts of their own group dynamics. Most pertinent to my project is this articles discussion of the following: the way in which our use of technology is not neutral and is dependent on the idea that “users import standards of communication established in offline forums” (193); the “flux” of “public use and perceptions about the possibilities of online communication and community” (193); and the qualities students identified as most important for creating a virtual community: trust, shared goals, communication, and proximity” (193). Usefully I think, one of the authors’ final comments on the conclusions reached through their study is as follows:

Only human commitment can bring [community] about. And here feminist practices can inform our Web-based teaching and research. For it is in these relatively new forums that we are classed to make explicit to our students and to ourselves the hidden, the tacit, the as-yet-unaccounted-for qualities that enhance and hinder human community in cyberspace. (199)

I think this quotation best sums up the pertinence of this article to my investigation and also the opportunities for exploration related to this topic. Again, I feel that more of a discussion of the study and the student responses themselves would have been useful, but, overall, I find this article very valuable to my project.