Studying the importance of belonging

In the current landscape of higher education, familiar challenges like disengaged students, faculty burnout, and high staff turnover can frequently dominate discussions. Often seen as separate issues, these challenges can be viewed through a systems perspective to reveal deeper, interconnected roots-chief among them a pervasive lack of belonging across all levels of academia. The recent COVID-19 pandemic seemed to have exacerbated these issues, leaving many students, staff, and faculty feeling isolated and overwhelmed.

To address these issues and suggest a possible solution, University of Colorado Boulder Professor of Physics Noah Finkelstein collaborated with CU Boulder Professor of History Phoebe Young to highlight the importance of belonging, or a sense of community, at institutes of higher learning in a recently published article for the journal Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning. From their work, they found that belonging is important on multiple levels, from students to faculty and staff to the institution itself, and that each of these levels can help support each other.

"One of the key takeaways is that each level impacts the other levels and is impacted by the other levels," Finkelstein explained. "So students, faculty, and institutions both benefit from a sense of belonging and are agents of belonging for these other layers."

A Background in Belonging

For years, Finkelstein and Young have studied the importance of belonging within separate institutional layers.

In addition to conducting studies that identify a sense of belonging as essential for student engagement and retention in physics classes, Finkelstein notes that, as a professor, he got a front-row seat to seeing how belonging impacted students. Given his role, he observed how students helped foster belonging not only for other students but also for faculty.

Additionally, Finkelstein studies the role of belonging at an institutional level, both in his research on institutional change and as he sits on the board of trustees for the Higher Learning Commission. From his position, he looks at how institutions are organized and the policies they implement to cultivate a community and sense of belonging among individuals.

Young elaborated, "I've done less formal research on faculty and staff belonging than Noah has done on either students or institutions." As Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, however, she led and published efforts within her department (the History Teaching and Learning Project and the Teaching Quality Initiative), which demonstrated the significance of faculty sense of belonging.

"We got together and said, 'Hey, why not combine forces on this,' and then we can highlight the systems view with multiple layers," Finkelstein added.

Belonging is Multi-Layered

Unlike previous literature, which has largely examined each layer individually, Finkelstein and Young adopted a systems view to explore the concept of belonging at its three essential layers: student, faculty and staff, and institutional. This multi-layered approach involved analyzing existing literature and case studies to understand how belonging impacts each group and their interdependencies.

"You can't look at any one of these groups in isolation, right?" Young said. "We have to think about how they relate to each other."

The researchers examined students' academic and social belonging, highlighting the importance of feeling connected to their field of study and peers. They also looked at how institutional support and recognition influence faculty and staff's ability to foster student belonging. Lastly, Finkelstein and Young considered how institutions themselves need to be viewed as integral parts of society to foster a collective sense of belonging.

The researchers saw that a strong sense of belonging is correlated with higher retention rates, increased engagement, and better academic performance for students. They found that, notably, belonging has a more substantial impact on retention for women in fields like physics than traditional metrics like exam scores.

For faculty and staff, Young and Finkelstein saw that belonging enhances their capacity to support students and contributes to institutional loyalty and reduced turnover.

At the institutional level, not only does the institute construct conditions for students and faculty belonging within college campuses, but also, increasingly, institutions for higher education need to make the case that they belong and contribute to our broader society.

Belonging During the COVID-19 Pandemic

For Young, the faculty and staff's sense of belonging was especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We noticed the importance of belonging more clearly when it got stressed and taken away during the pandemic. This was because of the way faculty were being so front and center and staff too on many occasions for trying to hold on to some kind of tenuous sense of student belonging. For them, they had fewer tools to do so than they would have normally had."

Finkelstein and Young found the pandemic revealed that a strong sense of belonging among faculty and staff is essential for their well-being and their capacity to support students effectively. This period underscored the interdependence of belonging across different levels within academia: diminished belonging among faculty and staff led to decreased student engagement, highlighting the need for systemic approaches to foster a supportive environment for all.

Belonging Beyond the Simple Fix

Given their observations, Young and Finkelstein suggest that moving forward, higher education institutes need to adopt this systems-wide thinking to ensure sustainable belonging within and beyond an institution.

"We often see belonging in the literature that belonging does matter, but there's often a kind of list, such as 'the top 10 things you can do to increase student belonging.'" Young stated. "So it becomes a kind of plug-and-play or one-off solution. So the institutions then say: 'Oh, we'll pick this one. We'll do that, and things will be better.'"

Instead, Finkelstein and Young suggest that shifting to a systems-wide view can help integrate belonging into an institutional framework more sustainably. This perspective requires rethinking institutional policies and practices to foster an environment where students, faculty, and staff all feel valued and supported. For institutions, this means not only addressing internal culture and policies but also how they are perceived externally. By positioning themselves as integral parts of the broader social fabric, institutions can garner public support and fulfill their mission to serve the public good more effectively.

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