The authors of this article demonstrate best practices for creating belonging in economics, which allows diverse students to feel respected and accepted within the discipline. Opportunities to connect with economics allow students to understand and be empowered by the value they add to the classroom. The suggested practices thus include providing…

Dr. Ada Long (1945-2024) advocated for equal access to quality education. Authors suggest that her reflections on neighborhoods, community, and intentional inclusion were not one-off musings but rather indicative of how she saw her responsibility as an educator. Drawing on Long's establishment of a lecture series that brought faculty into a local…

In this paper, we seek to understand how to foster an inclusive learning community in a social science remote course. Through student feedback, our retrospective reflections on our course design and teaching, and a literature review of effective strategies that promote inclusive learning environments, we highlight the importance of embedding…

Developing a sense of classroom community is important in promoting course satisfaction and in helping students overcome feelings of disconnectedness, especially in online courses. When considering the various strategies identified as contributing to a sense of classroom community, instructors likely need support in which strategies and technology…

In "Belonging and Identity in STEM Higher Education," leading scholars, teachers, practitioners and students explore belonging and identity in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields, and how this is impacted by disciplinary changes and the post-pandemic higher education context. In STEM fields, positivist…

This descriptive study offers lessons learned from students' experiences with a gamified, social media-like instructional approach in eighteen courses from spring 2021 through spring 2022. Researchers at a mid-sized university in the southeastern United States leveraged Christensen's (2011) disruptive innovation theory as a guiding framework to…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of integrating community of inquiry (COI) framework principles with flipped classroom pedagogy to enhance students' perceived presence sense, self-regulated learning, and learning performance. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to examine whether integrating COI framework principles…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive single case study was to understand how college instructors across a variety of discipline areas described the development of their instructional strategies to embed sense of community and cognitive presence in a blended class environment at a university in the Midwest United States. The Community of…

In this article, the authors critique the common approach used to study the effectiveness of technological interventions for raising students' sense of belonging. Two studies are reviewed, one used Facebook groups and the other used a makerspace. Both studies primarily failed to include any variable that measures the extent of student involvement…

This reflective essay discusses a course redesigned to enhance student belonging and the important role intentional use of technology plays in creating a belonging context. Before the redesign, some course elements aimed to create a belonging context by centering and valuing student choice, and through choice, respect of identity. However, there…

The benefits of creating learning communities have been clearly established in educational literature. However, the research on 'community-of-learning' has largely focused on intermediate and high-school contexts and on the benefits of co-facilitation in the classroom. In this paper, we contribute to educational research by describing an approach…

The COVID-19 pandemic has created not only an unprecedented public health crisis but also significant challenges for educators and educational institutions. In response, professionals must reassess current restrictions on assembly and mobility as well as imagine new means for meeting goals. All familiar educational routines--for example, meeting…

A qualified teaching method is hard to achieve without traditional classroom lessons. For learning purposes, students need to interact and influence each other, like being part of an osmotic process. They need to learn in a stimulating environment, developing the ability to manage conflicts and to compare opinions. How can this be possible during…

Large introductory science courses are a particularly important and challenging target for creating inclusive learning environments. In this study, we examined the impact of incorporating learning assistants (LAs) on the learning environment in an introductory biology course taught with two different structures: an in-person lecture with…

While group work is commonly discussed as an important aspect of communicative language teaching, its configuration is usually considered to be small groups of students rather than an entire group of course participants. Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism (Bakhtin, 1984; Holquist, 2002), this paper explores a view of group work as…