Before the pandemic, many of the typical learning experiences and programming opportunities offered at colleges and universities were simply platforms that enabled students to build connections, community, and belonging. While institutions commonly seek out programmatic and structural solutions to fostering belonging among students—such as first year seminars or a student activity center for instance—they should not lose sight of the importance of how student support is delivered in these spaces and its role in promoting belonging.
Based on findings from the Promoting At-Promise Student Success project, my colleagues and I argue that it is less about what specific program, class, or social activity is offered to students and more about how student support is offered in those spaces that matters for student success. I have illustrated elsewhere that, indeed, how support is delivered promotes student success. I contend that how support is delivered in the aforementioned spaces and the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with other students, staff, and faculty at the heart of many of those learning experiences and programming opportunities is what fosters a sense of belonging. In a forthcoming article in the Journal of College Student Development, my colleagues and I proposed the concept of Ecological Validation[1] as one promising direction for fostering student success that focuses on how support is delivered, rather than strictly what support is delivered that could be applied across educational contexts to promote belonging during the pandemic. In ecological validation, educators across student support contexts promote sense of belonging when they consistently take the initiative both in and out of the classroom to build relationships with students, learn about who they are, affirm that students’ identities, experiences, and backgrounds hold value and have a meaningful place in their college learning experience, and connect students to resources and learning opportunities to enable them to succeed.
The insight about how support is delivered and the core role of relationship building in Ecological Validation gives us hope and direction—an important lesson that can be applied to fostering college sense of belonging in this socially-distanced and often virtual-learning context that we find ourselves in during the pandemic. I encourage educators to think about the spaces and learning contexts where they engage with students during the pandemic, whether virtual or in-person and socially distanced. I also encourage all to seriously reflect on how they are approaching student support and to what extent they’re leveraging each of those opportunities to build meaningful relationships with students and enable students to build meaningful connections with their peers. Every educator, from faculty, to staff, to peer leaders, to administrators—whether they are interacting with students in a virtual environment or in-person and socially distanced—has a role in ecological validation and should consider ways that they can affirm students and validate their life experiences in the places where they support and engage with students. Doing so will immerse students in a college environment where they are being told on all fronts that they are an important part of the college learning community. They will receive the message that their experiences have a meaningful place in their college journey, they are a part of a community of learners who cares about them and their success, and someone (you the educator) will be there to empower them to succeed with the resources they need. This will no doubt promote their sense that they do indeed belong in college at a time when they may be feeling isolated and disconnected due to the pandemic.
Drawing on the underlying principles of Ecological Validation to foster belonging, educators should use learning spaces (e.g., classrooms, advising meetings, social events), whether virtual or in-person, to speak to their students and get to know them, build meaningful relationships with their students, ask them how they are doing, share who you are with them and invite them to share who they are, and use break-out rooms and small groups to facilitate building deeper, meaningful relationships between educator and student and to form community with their peers. Embed identity-conscious opportunities in (virtual) social activities and in the (virtual) classroom for students to engage with who they in the context of their learning experience to let them know they are seen, their experiences have value, and they belong in college. Acknowledge with your students the effects of the pandemic on our lives and how that can affect learning—give grace, and let students know you are there to connect them to the campus resources they may need to succeed and opportunities to forge connections with other students, staff, and faculty on campus or in virtual spaces. Let them know that you care about their personal success just as much as their academic success and that personal and academic success go hand-in-hand, perhaps even more so during the trials and tribulations of the pandemic. Reassure them that people in the college community care about them. Consider reframing office hours as informal virtual cafés where students are encouraged to drop-in to chat about academics, personal issues, or just to chat. Let students know you are genuinely interested in them and their success — send that email check-in to the student you noticed something seemed a little off with during class or in a financial aid counseling meeting the other day, schedule informal check-ins or coffee breaks with your students—even if it is online or socially distanced. Leadership needs to communicate the expectation that educators should commit the time necessary to foster these connections with their students to develop their sense of belonging, and that they will support them by making necessary adjustments to faculty and staff performance expectations and evaluations.
[1] Kitchen, J.A. Perez, R., Hallett, R., Kezar, A., & Reason, R. (forthcoming). Ecological Validation Model of Student Success: A New Student Support Model for Low-income, First-Generation, and Racially Minoritized Students. Journal of College Student Development.