S4E2: Belonging and Academic Success Part 2: Interventions to Foster Belonging

Belonging is a concept that is getting a lot of attention across college campuses these days, perhaps due to the mental health crisis, the lingering effects of isolation and loneliness of the pandemic, the attack on and stripping away of DEI programming in many schools, the tension between inclusivity and free speech, and a renewed attention to seeing belongingness as a universal and fundamental human need.

In August 2022, we published an episode on belonging, featuring 13 faculty and staff who shared their pedagogical practices for welcoming students and cultivating belonging in their classrooms. Since that episode is our second most listened to episode, we decided to take a deeper dive into the emerging and longstanding literature that examines what belonging means and why it matters. So, in the second half of this two-part episode on belonging and academic success, we explore additional crucial questions on how faculty can take action in furthering student belonging. What is the significance of belongingness for student wellbeing? How can we use interventions within course curriculum to promote student integration and feelings of belongingness?

As discussed in our previous episode, while a sense of belonging is recognized to be an important predictor of academic success, many students particularly – those from groups marginalized because of things like race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.—do feel excluded from learning spaces (see, for example, Tanner, 2013). This can hamper academic performance, as well as establish negative health effects rooted from a sense of alienation or exclusion.

In this episode of our two-parter series, we’ll dig into how thoughtful interventions, both in and out of the classroom, can be used to foster belonging. Tinto’s model of student retention emphasizes that a student’s academic performance is largely determined by the level of integration, or sense of belonging, that they experience in the classroom (Draper, 2003). Offering student focused activities such as field trips, extracurricular events, or even summer school can provide students with experiences that offer opportunities to build relationships with their peers (Draper, 2003). Additionally, embedding interventions and activities within course curriculum that focus on student reflection and mindfulness can encourage students to feel confident in their learning abilities and a higher willingness to engage in class, fostering a more fluid dynamic in the classroom positive forms of student retention (Walter & Yeager, 2011). Such efforts to promote a student’s sense of belonging, through student retention and interventions, not only contribute to the development of a student’s identity in an academic setting, but can also build a stronger sense of a student’s identity as an individual outside of the classroom (Bowen, 2021).

Throughout this episode, you’ll continue to hear from three Georgetown staff and faculty who share their knowledge, research, and insights about belonging and academic success. We’ll intersperse these conversations with research findings from relevant academic literature to add more depth and context.

Bios

Featured in this episode:* Susan Cheng, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the Georgetown School of Medicine; Former Senior Associate Dean for DEI in the School of Medicine, Associate Professor of Family Medicine and a Deputy TItle IX Coordinator

Stephon Hamell, Advising Dean in Georgetown’s College of Arts and Sciences
Yulia Chentsova Dutton, Associate Professor in the Psychology Department

Resources

Bibliography

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Bowen, J. (2021, October 21). Why is it important for students to feel a sense of belonging at school? “students choose to be in environments that make them feel a sense of fit,” says associate professor Deleon Gray. College of Education News. ****

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