Effervescence in a University Classroom: Ethnography, Survey and Heart Rate Variability

This presentation will show the results of a study conducted in two classrooms (experimental and control) at a university in Mexico City. The students in both groups attended a Sociology course with the same teacher at the same time, and it was their first university course in Sociology.

The primary goal of this study is to observe the formation of solidarity relationships among new students. As Vincent Tinto states (1993), intellectual and social memberships are crucial for college students' continued educational trajectories. Tinto uses Durkheim's notion of rituals to argue that social communities 'influence the willingness of students to stay in college.'

Utilizing these insights, we combined a fresh interpretation of Durkheim's rituals (by E. Goffman and R. Collins) with cutting-edge social neuroscience and psychological physiology research on interactional synchronization (García-Andrade 2023, 2024) to craft an experimental design. We aimed to understand if and how a sense of membership and an emotional community were fostered in two groups of students attending the same university course in the same trimester.

The objective of the presentation is to show the theoretical background of the study, the operationalization of the concept of effervescence (the fundamental element of successful rituals) using three techniques, and some results obtained in an experiment conducted from June to September 2024 in Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco.

We will show if recreational activities during the class promote effervescence in the experimental group. We are also interested in the conditions that favor or prevent the formation of a sense of membership or being part of the group. In the long run, the study will follow the students' trajectories, relations with other group members, and insertion into university life.