Understanding students' sense of belonging in Higher Education is crucial for designing courses that improve retention, learning, and wellbeing outcomes. With the rise of online learning, educators face new challenges in fostering belonging in virtual environments. This study delves into the experiences of twenty postgraduate students in online…

In early 2020, the introduction of COVID-19 restrictions meant that doctoral programmes which depended on face-to-face models for teaching, learning, and interaction needed to quickly reconsider their established practices. Of particular concern was the impact of pandemic restrictions upon the development of a sense of community among doctoral…

Previous studies have shown that social exclusion can have negative effects on the well-being of children and adolescents. However, there is inconsistent evidence regarding how the impact of social exclusion changes with age. This study used the Cyberball paradigm to investigate the effects of exclusion and subsequent inclusion on primary needs…

In this dissertation, I seek to understand whether and how values affirmation could have an impact on the academic performance and psychological well-being of deaf students in secondary deaf schools in Nepal. In Paper 1, I reported findings from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) on the impact of values affirmation on the academic performance and…

This article focuses on children's perspectives of belonging to a place, in this case a Finnish preprimary school setting. This study explores "place-belonging" in photographs originally taken by the children in their preprimary school activities. "Photo-telling" was applied as a methodology to link narrative and visual…

Large number of existing studies employ acculturation as the framework to explore Chinese international students (CIS), which recently have been criticized from post-colonial perspectives (Spencer-Oatey et al., 2007; Tierney, 1999; Yao, 2015). With Gen Z Chinese international students step into American higher institutions, this study aims to…

Bystanders to bullying perpetration are considered an extremely important group to engage in bullying prevention and intervention. It is important to understand the key differences between students who are proactive bystanders, who try to stop the bullying and those bystanders who observe but take no action to help the student being bullied. Of…

Little is known about how supportive relationships and parent communities materialize, or fail to materialize, in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) settings characterized by family diversity. This paper explores parents' lived experiences of belonging and non-belonging through semi-structured interviews with 12 parents of children from…

The purpose of this article is to describe adult learners' sense of belonging when studying remotely in Malaysia. The methodology of the research involved carrying out in-depth interviews with twelve adult learners studying in a distance education institution to uncover their sense of belonging. The collected data was then analysed with Nvivo…

Studies show that university students report higher levels of mental health problems and lower well-being than their non-student peers. As demand for university well-being services increases, so too does the need for alternative interventions to support student well-being for students in various states of mental health. In this paper, we introduce…

The integration of non-local students into their host environments and their ability to develop meaningful local relationships are concerns for researchers, educators, and policymakers. Given the increased diversity of higher educational settings, a deeper understanding of these topics can help residential halls better accommodate students from…

From a child-centered perspective, this article explores the practices of children's self-organized play-communities in institutional everyday life in Danish early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings, based on a phenomenological non-participant-observational study with a duration of 16 months involving two kindergartens (Bernstorff,…

As the number of international students in higher education continues to grow, so do concerns regarding systemic obstacles, discrimination, and social isolation that can impede students' academic success. Peer mentorship has been shown to support graduate students through academic socialization and achievement in higher education (Lorenzetti et…

Through exploration of Black Caribbean youths' feelings of unbelonging and exclusion in Ontario schools, this paper argues that how Whiteness is systemically engrained in the education system negatively affects the learning experiences of Black youth due to predetermined measures of belonging. The present article draws on data from 32 qualitative…

Despite the increasing number of non-traditional doctoral researchers, this population's experiences remain largely understudied and their voices unheard. Through in-depth interviews with 24 part-time online doctoral candidates, we explored the perceived facilitators and barriers to academic integration and sense of belonging, as well as how…