Goals

To share ideas for inclusive culturally relevant icebreaker activities that set the tone for community-building in your online class.

Intro

As you think through laying the foundation for community-building in your course, you'll want to provide some type of activity that allows students to get to know one another. There is no single approach to this. While the goal is building community, the icebreaker should reflect you, your course, and your students. As a trauma-informed practice, it is generally best to keep icebreakers "light" when sharing personal informational (options like "choose two of these questions" can help with this). As a culturally responsive teaching practice, we're also wanting this to be a space where students feel like they belong and can feel safe to show up as their authentic selves. And on top of all of this, it can be helpful to begin to build disciplinary content into your icebreakers too.

Icebreaker discussions can be good places for:

setting the tone for inclusion
inviting students to be co-creators
incorporating student stories
being culturally affirming

Explore

Equity Unbound has several community-building activity ideas for various course modalities.
Feel free to do Google Searches to find new icebreakers to use as community-building practices in your course.
Open our Let's Collect Icebreakers - GoogleDoc. Our Mesa Humanize cohort helped us to curate a list of their favorites.

Instructions

Then choose a community-building idea to add to your own course. You can borrow an idea shared above, or create your own.
Add it to your Canvas course. Most commonly these are setup as Canvas Discussions, but you may be using a different tool which okay too.
We recommend including your icebreaker discussion in the Orientation or Week 1 module of your course.