Under normal circumstances, rhetoric should serve as an opportunity for first-year students to create connections, said University of Iowa rhetoric lecturers Colin Kostelecky and Brittany Borghi. This year, they are both teaching virtually and are worried about students missing out on building community in the class.

“Rhetoric is often a place where … 18 year-olds and first years make lifelong friendships. They sort of cut their teeth on what it means to be a college student and that often emerges by making friends with people from other backgrounds right from all over the world,” Kostelecky said. “And it’s hard to do that in a digital space, unless you put in extra effort to build community.”

Kostelecky said he decided to add a pen pal initiative to his curriculum. Each student was matched with a peer based on their answers to a survey about their background, interests, and hopes for the class. Kostlecky said the buddy system will give students a relationship with a peer to help them get through the semester.

Borghi heard about the idea from Kostelecky before the fall semester started, and said she decided to implement letter writing into her class, too.

“They need a way to connect that makes the person on the screen a little bit more real and any way of becoming physical instead of digital is a way of doing that. And so writing letters felt like a great way to do that,” she said.

Pen palling also gives students a break from their computer. Kostelecky said the physical medium appealed to him because he was worried about students suffering from Zoom fatigue.

Kostelecky’s students sent their first letters last week and Borghi’s students did so this week, but so far they have received positive feedback from students. They both heard concerns from their students about meeting new people, and that made some students excited to write the letters.

UI freshman Tasha Gilkison, who is in Kostelecky’s class, said when she first heard about the assignment, she was skeptical.

“It didn’t sound like something we would do in college,” she said. “But once he started to explain it, I was kind of interested to see how it could form new relationships.”

Gilkison, a neuroscience major, was paired with a biology major. Besides their shared interest in science, she said they also have a similar mentality about school and connected on a social level.

As Gilkson prepared to write her second letter to her pen pal, she said the initiative was going well for her.

“It’s actually making me feel more comfortable in producing writing that I can feel confident and excited about. I actually really like it so far,” she said.

Kostelecky and Borghi said they each have ways to hold students accountable for writing their letters, but they are not reading the content.

“I don’t want to survey their correspondence,” Kostelecky said. “I want them to feel like it’s honestly where they can openly connect with another college student.

Gilkison said while she prefers to do in-person classes when it’s safe, she has been able to get to know her peers well in rhetoric without sitting next to them.

“We are in the very privileged position of giving people that opportunity to meet and to connect and to form relationships they’ll have for the rest of their lives hopefully,” Borghi said. “My best friend from college is somebody that I met on the first day of college and so I know how crucial those little relationships are. Those little beginnings are so important.”