Appendix B: Community Guidelines and Peer Review
Jackie Hendricks; Amy Lueck; Loring Pfeiffer; and Maura Tarnoff
Community Guidelines
It is essential to establish community guidelines to create a positive and collaborative classroom space that fosters productive discussions and peer review. It’s a great activity for the first week of class. We recommend using the process for developing community guidelines [Website] established by the Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning at Brown University.
Peer Review
In several modules of this textbook, we encourage you to engage in peer review. Once your community guidelines are in place, you can follow these suggestions for collaboratively engaging with your fellow students’ work. We also invite you to consider using a helpful peer review tool [Website] developed by Julia Kovatch, Bryce Nishikawa, Loring Pfeiffer, Nicole Branch, and Julia Voss.
Giving Constructive Feedback Using the “Sandwich Method”
When formulating your feedback, approach it with positive intentions and constructive feedback as a supportive communication tool to address specific issues or concerns.
To make your feedback more helpful, base it on the individual’s behavior rather than your interpretations or assumptions about how they perform. You should focus on things that can be changed or improved, rather than something that may be out of the other person’s control. Remember, when providing feedback, you have a real opportunity to be helpful. Providing feedback is not just a learning moment for the person you are critiquing, but also one that helps you learn problem-solving. It may be the case that the things you pointed out are also areas you have been working on, so it can be beneficial to you both.
When providing feedback, think of how you would like to be critiqued. Don’t begin it by instantly bombarding the other person with the issues you want to address. You would like to start with some positive comments regarding the situation in question. The first compliment is usually general; we can call this the bottom bun. Then you want to get a bit more specific and point out at least two strong points that the person excelled at. Now here’s when things get a bit cheesy. Here, you must clearly deliver your criticism. One trick you can use is to think about how you would like to be made aware of a mistake or an area that requires further attention. Then you can remind the person again of their strong points. Finally, you can finish up the sandwich with a second bun on top by giving thanks for your peer’s hard work and offering support.
Overall, the sandwich method works for both parties. It enables both you and your peer to feel better about the situation. It will make your peer feel as if all that hard work didn’t go to waste—they have done great so far, but there is still room for producing even better work.
Discussing Feedback
When we receive constructive criticism from our peers, sometimes the value of that feedback can be lost in the way it is phrased or how the listener receives it. Below, we offer some suggestions for conversations with your peers that may make exchanging feedback more harmonious and productive.
Being Open to Diverse Perspectives
Hearing diverse perspectives can be difficult, especially when they directly challenge your own beliefs and values. However, it’s important not to become defensive when you are presented with different opinions. Being open to diverse perspectives not only makes everyone feel heard and understood but also helps broaden your worldview and makes you think outside the box. A major reason for diverse perspectives is cultural diversity. A person’s culture is shaped by personal experiences, including ethnic and racial identity, religion, age, educational level, body size, heritage, family tradition, physical and cognitive abilities, sexual orientation, gender identity, and geographic and socioeconomic experiences (National PTA).
What Is Cultural Sensitivity?
Cultural sensitivity is a key component of becoming open to diverse perspectives. According to the American Psychological Association (2020), cultural sensitivity is defined as “awareness and appreciation of the values, norms, and beliefs characteristic of a cultural, ethnic, racial, or other group that is not one’s own, accompanied by a willingness to adapt one’s behavior accordingly.” By becoming more culturally sensitive, you’ll be able to better understand other people’s perspectives and behaviors and how to respond appropriately (“Cultural sensitivity”).
How to Be Culturally Sensitive
- Learn about your worldview and your biases
Learning about your worldview includes thinking about how your background, experiences, and heritage have shaped who you are. Compare yourself to other people with a similar heritage and notice how there are differences between you (e.g., someone of the same ethnicity may have differing beliefs and values due to upbringing). Furthermore, analyze your own perspective, prejudices, biases, and stereotypes regarding other cultures. It can be difficult to question your own beliefs and worldview. However, you are more likely to embrace alternative cultures if you understand your own culture and the misperceptions you may hold (“How can a person”).
- Learn about other cultures
The best way to learn about other cultures is to draw from various sources of knowledge. For instance, you can take a formal course at school (e.g., an Indigenous studies or world cultures course), you can read books or academic journal articles by diverse authors, watch documentaries regarding other cultures, learn a second language, travel to other places, or even use social media as a way to learn and connect to other cultures. However, it’s important to recognize that not all information you come across is accurate. Social media, TV and movies can potentially perpetuate harmful stereotypes and prejudices about other cultures. Hence, try to do your own research to validate the information you come across (“How can a person”) (Clay).
- Learn by asking questions
Although you can learn about other cultures, it’s impossible to become an expert on every culture. In addition, every person experiences their culture differently. Hence, even if you think all people from a certain heritage behave a certain way or have specific customs, the particular person that you’re dealing with may not. To clarify any assumptions, take a curious approach by asking them about their traditions, customs, and everyday life. This way, you can better assess their own perspective and avoid offending them (“How can a person”).
- Avoid Pitfalls
- Don’t be defensive when corrected about cultural terms, customs, or expectations.
- Don’t demand or expect other people to educate you on their culture or customs. Not everyone is open to talking about their culture, so it’s important to accept that the other person may feel uncomfortable.
- Don’t take defensiveness personally. People of other cultures may feel less empowered or comfortable opening up.
- Don’t stop learning! Becoming truly culture-conscious is an ongoing process. Engaging with people from other cultures can be fun and is the best way to understand diverse perspectives (“How to be culturally sensitive”).
How to Lead and Collaborate with Empathy
If you’ve taken the time to read all of The Wicked Problems uncovered and shared by learners during the Liberated Learner development, there are many common threads. One that stands out is the critically important skill of empathy. Molly Flindall-Hanna’s story “In Their Shoes [Website]” tells of her “learning to walk in the shoes of my clients in the field of cultural safety;” in “Le Mouton Noir [Website],” Matilde Chagnon tells of finally feeling barriers lifted after conversations with a student life aid who truly listened without judgment and took on her perspective to find solutions. And empathy is just that—perspective taking, judgment-free, and taking in the emotions and feelings of others and communicating it back to them in a way that helps, not hinders. This animated video from RSA Shorts illustrates this best:
Let’s break down those skills again on how you can be a better empath when you’re collaborating with others.
Perspective-Taking
Perspective-taking is at the very heart of empathy. We normally learn how to take on another’s perspectives from our parents or primary caregivers while growing up. And the unfortunate reality is that the more your perspective is aligned with the dominant culture (in Canada, that would be white, Christian, educated, middle-class, and heterosexual), the less you are likely to have learned about perspective-taking. All of our characteristics and experiences influence how we see the world—our own truth—which is different and unique for each of us. Perspective taking is viewing and listening to others’ truths and acknowledging them as true. It is the “art of looking at a situation through the identity lens and experiences of the person having the experience—not through your own identities/experiences” (“Health promotion”).
Learning more about another person can help you to imagine what life feels like for them—how they may respond to different situations and circumstances. This is a skill—you need to have the ability to feel, share, interpret, and understand emotions in order to ‘put yourself in their shoes’ in order to see the world from their perspective. This can be difficult for some, as you need to be able to imagine attitudes, expectations, and intentions that could be quite different from your own.
How can you build your perspective-taking skills?
You can build your ability to see things more clearly from another’s viewpoint through a few simple measures:
- Be an active listener and ask more questions of others. We all find that person who talks non-stop about themselves a tad annoying. Consider how you converse and connect with others, and modify it to open yourself up to learning more about the other person.
- Read fiction books. Yes, this can be challenging to do as a student, as you may sometimes feel overwhelmed with course-related reading. But fiction (particularly dramatic fiction) can transport you to become emotionally and empathically invested in a story and take on the perspective of the characters in the book.
- Watch dramatic films. If fiction books aren’t your thing, consider watching dramatic movies—a more subdued film about relationships can teach you more about emotions and empathy than a slapstick comedy. Plus, who doesn’t love the movies?
How can you stay out of judgment?
In the RSA short, Brené Brown points out that when you judge another person’s feelings, it discounts their experience—and sometimes this is a defense mechanism to protect ourselves from their pain. If we are honest with ourselves, we all can recount a time where someone was sharing their pain caused discomfort for us and perhaps even made us think to ourselves ‘why are they getting so upset?”—or worse, commenting something along the lines of “it’s no big deal.” But empathy is not about you—it is about others—and staying out of judgment means you have to push down any feelings or comments that invalidate the other person’s experience.
A Judgment-Free Self
You can build your judgment-free self in many ways—but here are a few to try:
- Keep a “judgment journal.” Over a period of a few days, take stock of when you catch yourself thinking (or saying) negative thoughts about someone else and ask yourself what prompted this reaction. You may start to notice some patterns.
- Rethink your reactions. If you are working with someone who seems distracted, instead of thinking “Fran is so lazy,” you could reframe this as “I wonder why Fran is so preoccupied? Maybe she has something going on in her life that is causing her to act this way.”
- Take a social media hiatus. Social media can be a festering ground for public judgment. We’ve all gotten riled up by social media posts at one point or another—and perhaps even drawn into a comments section battle with a complete stranger (or bot!). This often has zero positive outcomes and rarely results in a changed behavior. But you can change yours by taking a break, or if that’s too difficult, “hide” the posts or feeds that may get you the most riled up.
How can you better identify what that person is feeling?
Understanding others is a cornerstone of empathy. Think about the last time you went to the doctor when you were unwell. You likely were trying to convey your symptoms, but a good physician would also be trying to figure out your emotions and use those to make a better diagnosis. It’s not just about words in a conversation; it’s all the various other methods we have of communicating.
You can better understand what a person is feeling by
- Notice the non-verbal or subtext. Observing their body language, tone of voice, and other non-verbal elements of communication can directly impact the interpretation and meaning behind the words spoken. This can be difficult when engaging with people digitally—in this case, you should notice subtext [Website].
- Listen actively and closely. Steven Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change, once said, “Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Simple measures such as holding eye contact, nodding, and saying “mmhmm” can subtly encourage others to continue to share their thoughts.
- Make what you say meaningful—and not about you. Reflecting and paraphrasing what they said back to them can also help create a better understanding. Asking questions can also help clarify. Avoid comparing their experiences to yours. We sometimes think bringing up a similar anecdote is helpful, but it can discount and minimize the experience they are sharing with you
How can you demonstrate that you care about how that person is feeling?
Showing that you care about others and their feelings can build trust and engagement in any relationship—be it personal, academic, or professional. It’s one thing to say you care about others, but it is another to act upon it through your daily interactions with others. All of the earlier tips on building empathy apply here—listening, asking questions, and showing interest in what people are saying.
“Appendix B: Community Guidelines and Peer Review” by Jackie Hendricks, Amy Lueck, Loring Pfeiffer, and Maura Tarnoff is adapted from “Allyship” from Liberated Learners: How to Learn with Style co-designed by Students, Faculty and Staff at Trent University, Brock University, Seneca College, University of Windsor, McMaster University, Cambrian College and Nipissing University and edited by Terry Greene and Kyle Mackie, used under CC BY-NC 4.0. “Appendix B: Community Guidelines and Peer Review” is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.
