Pedagogical Choices for Building Community and Belonging in the Pandemic Classroom

Abstract: The onset of COVID-19 jarred higher education to the core and while universities are looking for ways to return to some normalcy, the impacts of the pandemic on the logistics of the college classroom will linger. Alternative delivery formats and the unique and shifting needs of students required all instructors to rethink how to support classroom community and foster a sense of belonging. With the unpredictability of the “post-pandemic” world, and the recognition that community and belonging are vital components to student academic success, CTLs must learn what we can from instruction during COVID-19 to support instructors in the coming months. To this end, we propose a project that identifies pedagogical choices instructors used to enhance community and belonging in non-typical classrooms and evaluates their effectiveness based on student responses about their own self efficacy and belonging. The project will use data gathered during an extensive study conducted over the past eleven months, including over 100 instructors and over 6000 students at a public, land grant university. Because of the class-level design of the interviews and surveys within that initial study, in addition to identifying best practices for supporting community in non-typical classrooms, our project will disaggregate these data- supported strategies for fostering community by discipline and modality. The unique positioning of our data collection within the pandemic allows for a relational comparison of instructor choice and student response, as well as a wider sample of educators than often are included in such studies of innovation.