Community in classrooms: Practical strategies to foster engineering students' sense of belonging

ABSTRACT

CONTEXT "Loneliness, defined as a subjective experience of social isolation, has been identified as the next public health epidemic of the 21st century” (Lim, 2018). When combined with the recent impact of COVID-19 on engineering education, advancing our understanding of belonging and community forms a critical and timely challenge. Mounting evidence points to student belonging as a foundation of engaged learning, persistence to graduation and student wellbeing. However, understanding how to foster a sense of belonging to a community remains elusive as there is an absence of scholarly literature pointing to the practical activities and approaches that can be applied to develop inclusion and a sense of close connection between students and their learning communities. PURPOSE The purpose of our work is to explore the aforementioned gap in the literature, and to establish a foundation for practical methods to foster students' sense of belonging to learning communities within undergraduate engineering classrooms. Our scope includes pre-COVID and during-COVID timelines, and thus includes face-to-face, blended and fully online learning environments. APPROACH As part of a case study research design, informal pedagogical interventions were designed and delivered within face-to-face, blended and online tutorial and lecture settings, aimed at building relationships and fostering students' sense of membership, partnership and ownership. The cohorts included undergraduate engineering mathematics courses with ~500 local and international students. Our mixed method approach captured quantitative and qualitative data relating to students' experiences of interventions and their sense of belonging to the learning community. OUTCOMES Our results indicate that there are practical activities and approaches that teachers can incorporate to give students a sense of feeling included or believing they are closely connected to a learning community in face-to-face, blended and completely online environments. Successful strategies involved flexibility, friendliness, interactivity, encouragement, and support. SUMMARY Our work supports the position that students' sense of belonging can be enhanced in the classroom through teacher-led pedagogy. Furthermore, instilling in teaching staff an awareness of the importance of cultivating community and enacting pedagogical warmth is also impactful and can lay the necessary foundation for more specific interventions. Copyright © J. Khanna and A. Bigham, 2021.