Making connections, interacting, and learning to collaborate with peers are vital components of the student experience. This may start in person but there are now many more ways that extend both informal and formal learning through the development of multimodal social learning communities. Students are empowered to co-create their own virtual learning places using social media providing valued space to develop a more personalised and inclusive learning relationship; and the choice to interact when and where they choose. Scaffolded by tutors, this can provide support to develop interpersonal communication and cooperation. This presentation will share suggestions on how social media can support mattering where students build trust and feel significant; steps to ensure they understand what is expected of them in these spaces; and shared experiences where students have learned to work cooperatively, motivating them to achieve the goals they have planned.  

1. SRHE Landscapes
of Learning for
Unknown Futures:
Prospects for
Space in Higher
Education -
Symposia 1 –
Networks
Mattering, meaning making
and motivation: Building
trust and respect through
multimodal social learning
communities
Sue
Beckingham
@suebecks

2. Mattering, meaning making and motivation: Building trust and respect
through multimodal social learning communities
Making connections, interacting, and learning to collaborate with peers are vital
components of the student experience. This may start in person but there are now
many more ways that extend both informal and formal learning through the
development of multimodal social learning communities. Students are empowered
to co-create their own virtual learning places using social media providing valued
space to develop a more personalised and inclusive learning relationship; and the
choice to interact when and where they choose. Scaffolded by tutors, this can
provide support to develop interpersonal communication and cooperation.
This presentation will share suggestions on how social media can support
mattering where students build trust and feel significant; steps to ensure they
understand what is expected of them in these spaces; and shared experiences
where students have learned to work cooperatively, motivating them to achieve
the goals they have planned.

4. Develop both bonding and bridging social capital
Putnam, 2000
Bonding:
trust and social support
Bridging:
information sharing

5. Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992:14) define social capital as
“The sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by
virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of
mutual acquaintance and recognition”

6. Reality

7. The reality is
many of our students
commute to and from
university, they have
caring responsibilities,
part/full time jobs,
cultural and religious
commitments

8. Rising costs
£
Mental Health
Other barriers
Students need to know that they matter
Maslow’s Hierarchy (Maslow 1943)

9. “Mattering is the experience
that you are valued and that
you can add value, is highly
relatable across geographic and
cultural boundaries”
(Prilleltensky, 2019:1)
“Meaning in Life (MIL) may be defined
as the extent to which one’s life is
experienced as making sense, as being
directed and motivated by valued
goals, and as mattering in the world.
(George and Park, 2017:614)

10. Not
mattering

11. Elements of Mattering
Awareness
• I am the object of
other’s attention
• Other:
• Notices me
• Recognises me
• Is familiar with me
• Remembers my name
• Is aware of my presence
• Focuses attention on
me
• Does not ignore me
Importance
• I am an object of
other’s concern
• Other:
• Invests resources in me
• Promotes my welfare
• Is attentive to my needs
• Provides emotional
support for me
• Takes pride in me
• Cares about what I do
• Criticises me for my
own good
• Inconveniences self for
me
• Listens to me
Reliance
• Other chooses/looks
to me
• Other:
• Seeks my advice
• Depends on me
• Seeks support from me
• Seeks resources from
me
• Needs me
• Misses me
• Trusts me to be there
• Values my contribution
Elliot et al, 2004: 343

12. ?
Communication is key but can be complex
Tutor to Student
Student to Tutor
Student to Student

13. low motivation, poor attendance, non contribution, taking over,
disorganised, unbalanced skills set, siloed working
Factors inhibiting
successful
groupwork
What happens when
communication breaks down

14. As educators we have an
important role to ensure our
students understand
non-verbal communication

15. Understanding non-verbal
communication
Adapted from Jones, 2017
Gestures:
adaptors (fiddling), emblems
(agreed meanings) and
illustrators (eye contact, head
movement and posture)
Touch:
functional-professional,
social-polite,
friendship-warmth
Time:
biological (lark/owl),
physical (seasonal) and
cultural (polychronic or
monochronic)
Personal space:
public, social,
personal, intimate
Territoriality
Kinesics Haptics
Chronemics Proxemics

16. Polycontextuality and
boundary crossing
Where individuals are “engaged not only
in multiple simultaneous tasks and task-
specific participation frameworks within
one and the same activity. They are also
increasingly involved in multiple
communities of practice.”
Engestrom et al, 1995: 320

17. “How can we use group work as an opportunity for
the assessment for learning and to help students
develop a range of transversal skills that enable
them to create and use their own participatory
spaces for the sharing of knowledge?“
Hooks (1994:15) raised this question:

18. Through the use of social media my students transitioned from a
group to an interdependent team

19. Effective Group
Communication
Scheduling
meetings
Mix of in-
person and
online
meetings
Chat space
Ideation
Open and
collaborative
workspace
Responding to
feedback on
work
Reviewing
work
How my students used social media in groupwork

20. Helped to improve time management, organisation and
record keeping

21. Made use of emoji to overcome lack of non-verbal communication

23. “Trying to work coherently and meeting people's
standards and at the same time also respecting
people and their time. I think that's a massive one
and some people like to work in mornings, some
people like to work late in the evenings. People have
different things and different commitments that are
going on.”
Taking time to get to know members of their group

24. “I learned how to empathise with different people and
how to lead different types of people and also just help
me understand that you have to give yourself a certain
amount of time to be able to get the work done. It
definitely helped me to respect deadlines at work”.
“I'd say probably empathy as well to sort of understand
people, behaviours and how you know being
understanding in different situations that can come up at
university and understanding that sometimes people can't
always be at every meeting 'cause they've got their own
commitments, their own personal stuff going on.”
Peer learning through peer support

25. “Being able to share content easily and being
able to send links and ideas that you see on the
fly led to conversations and sparked new ideas”
Anytime, anywhere

26. Using social media
Pros
• Multimodal opportunities for
knowledge gathering and sharing
• Open collaborative use of social
computing
• Polycontextuality: multiple
engagement spaces providing
different affordances
• Develops bridging and bonding
social capital
• Reflective space to revisit
progress
• Provides a biography of social
and relational memory
Cons
• Diversity of social media
spaces/contexts
• Antipathy to use of social media
• Privacy concerns
• Implications for international
students where banned
• Longevity of social space
• Multi-polycontextual space
overload

27. References
Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L. (1992) An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Polity
Elliot, G., Kao, S., & Grant, A.-M. (2004). Mattering: empirical validation of a social-psychological
concept. Self and Identity, 3, 339–354. https://doi.org/10.1080/13576500444000119
Engeström, Y., Engeström, R., & Kärkkäinen, M. (1995). Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in
expert cognition: Learning and problem solving in complex work activities. Learning and Instruction,
5(4), 319–336. https://doi.org/10.1016/0959-4752(95)00021-6
Flett, G. (2018). The Psychology of Mattering: Understanding the Human Need for Significance.
Academic Press.
George, L. S. and Park, C. L. (2017) The Multidimensional Existential Meaning Scale: A tripartite
approach to measuring meaning in life. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 12(6), 613-627.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2016.1209546
Hooks, B. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
Jones, R. G. (2017). Communication in the Real World: An Introduction to Communication
Studies. Flat World Knowledge.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–
396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346
Prilleltensky, I. (2019) Mattering at the Intersection of Psychology, Philosophy, and Politics.
American Journal of Community Psychology, 65(1-2), 16-34. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12368
Putnam, R. D. Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. Simon and Schuster
Ltd.
Richardson, K. and Hessey, S. (2009) Archiving the self? Facebook as biography of social and
relational memory. Journal of Information, Communication and Ethics in Society, 7(1), 29-38,
https://doi.org/10.1108/14779960910938070

28. Sue Beckingham | @suebecks
National Teaching Fellow and Principal Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University
with a research interest in the use of social media in education.
Blog: http://socialmediaforlearning.com/
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suebeckingham