More than fifty years ago, sociologist Mark Granovetter’s research showed that randomly bumping into people influences innovation. He coined these casual acquaintances as “weak ties,” or individuals in a social network that are outside of the group with whom we interact regularly and have deeper, trusting relationships. Weak ties drive innovation, according to his work, because they expose us to ideas (and opportunities) that we wouldn’t typically encounter in conversations with our usual contacts.
I have been thinking about how this relates to faculty innovation in higher education teaching and learning. I started teaching more than twenty years ago — and this story is going to feel super old to many of you! When I began as a part-time instructor teaching one class per semester, at night after my day job, my interactions with other faculty were pretty limited. When I was hired to teach full-time at a college, I worked in a building that included faculty teaching many different disciplines. I had my core group of colleagues who I convened with at departmental meetings and one colleague who had an office next to mine (we are still good friends today). The building held many faculty offices and classrooms. There was also a small “work room” that included a copy machine, a library of color slides (for teaching art and art history), a phone, and a small desk. The desk was usually occupied by a part-time instructor awaiting the start of their class (part-time faculty at community colleges generally don’t have offices, based on my experiences). This workroom was what organizational development researcher, Tanya Menon, refers to as a “social hub.”
Social hubs are places that are more likely to result in happenstance interactions with people you don’t know and they’re correlated with expanding our reportoire of ideas. When I would pop into the workroom to make a copy or select some slides for my class, I would say hello and interact with the individual(s) in that space. These may have been people I saw each week or someone I had never previously met. Those interactions would often lead to questions — maybe questions about the slide I was looking for or I might ask someone about a handout they were copying for their students. And those conversations led to new and unexpected topics.
When I moved from teaching into faculty development (supporting faculty with developing their teaching practice), we would often say that “water cooler moments” — like my work room moments — were the best moments for picking up new teaching ideas. That was a long time ago. Recently, I’m thinking about how much has changed and how these changes may be preventing the sharing of teaching ideas.
My experiences draw primarily from working at and with community colleges. Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I am an advocate for access in higher education and for equitable, effective teaching that supports the needs of diverse learners. I’m also very interested in highlighting the intersection between inclusive working conditions and student success. My commitment to access is what drives my dedication to supporting online classes. They open doors for students who are otherwise left out of higher education. But there’s a side effect of the enormous growth in online classes at community colleges that isn’t discussed often, from my experiences.
In community colleges, online classes began to grow significantly around 2010 and in the decade that followed that, on-campus class enrollments shrunk as online enrollments grew. In my circles, relatively few people knew that, because enrollment data, overall, stayed relatively stable and it wasn’t openly disaggregated by course modality. And after courses shifted online during COVID, online course offerings have remained high — accounting for over half of community college student enrollments.
Generally, when faculty teach more classes online, they are on campus less. And if they’re on campus less, it makes me wonder what has happened to the quantity of their weak tie interactions. It seems to me that in person conferences are still the norm for meeting new people — but they’re expensive and not an option for a lot of faculty (for many, many reasons). Have institutions thought about this structural change and considered ways to reconstruct social hubs digitally?
I can share from my own experiences that Twitter between the years of 2010-2020 dramatically increased my own teaching innovations. Having an online social community that also ebbed and flowed through the use of hashtags was unparalleled for me as a space to connect with and learn from people I didn’t otherwise know (but many did turn into trusted friends). I also recall a really cool program from EdSurge about ten years ago called Loop. It invited educators to sign up for an open-ended 30-minute online video meeting with an educator located anywhere in the world. I remember two conversations I had with Loop — one with an educator from Canada and one with an educator from Alaska. It was a really cool program I still think about. What I liked about it was that it took the load off of me to pair myself with someone, which also increased the possibility of being paired with someone different from me (a bias humans are inclined towards and I intentionally work on).
What are your thoughts about this topic? Does the idea of weak ties influencing experimentation and innovation resonate with your experiences? How do you encounter new people and new ideas — other than Substack? What opportunities do you see in this area for digital spaces/programs?
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