A big challenge in teaching is thinking about how we develop a connection with our students and help them to feel like they are part of this huge institution. There are many things that we can do, that may not appear to be significant, that can foster this feeling of connection or belonging.
Principles for building belonging
UTS has developed four key principles, found in our Building Belonging infographic, to guide understanding of what belonging means:
- Communicating care and concern
- Fostering meaningful encounters
- Practising radical inclusion
- Inspiring agency
Find out more about the belonging principles in this blog post.
We can talk about how we support these principles in three ways. This includes:
- relationships between staff and students
- relationships between students and their peers
- the quality and nature of the learning environment
The question is, how do we do this when we have such limited time with our students, and with the pressures of having to deliver content?
Building belonging workshop for casual academics
This is something we explored recently in a workshop on building belonging in the classroom. Casual academics from across the university came together to share experiences and learn from each other about how they can integrate this into the time with their students.
Challenges people shared included:
- How much do you share about yourself and your work – is this oversharing? Or is it interesting and useful to connect the students to the world of work beyond the walls of UTS?
- How do you keep students engaged across the session, and during classes that run for several hours?
- We acknowledge it’s important to learn students’ names as soon as possible to show we care and are interested in them as individuals… but what if you get their name wrong?
Weekly warm-ups and wisdom walls
In the workshop we discussed a few approaches to building belonging. Starting off your class with a ‘weekly warm-up’ is one way to build connection and learn more about your students. Before you start discussing subject content, allow a few minutes for everyone to share something, either related to the subject or their life outside study. Don’t make the topics too personal, and try and keep them general so people can share only as much as they are willing. This warm-up works well for both online and face-to-face classes using a platform such as Menti or whiteboard.
Another way to foster relationships between students and their peers is a ‘Wisdom Wall’. At the end of the teaching session, ask students to share what they wished they knew at the start of session that would have made their life easier. This could be around managing workload, approach to assessments, connecting with classmates or preparing for class. The students then share their insights anonymously to a collaborative online space (such as a Padlet or Miro). The resulting information collected becomes a ‘Wisdom Wall” that is shared with the next group of students starting out at the beginning of the next session, and built upon over time. This creates a connection between cohorts, and also helps the students sharing their wisdom to realise that they did learn something about how to manage at university and navigate their studies!
To emulate this, we have created a ‘Wisdom Wall’ with the participants of the most recent Building Belonging in your Classroom workshop held in February 2024. We asked them a few weeks after the workshop to share their insights and ideas about what worked well for them this session to help build belonging. We will show this to the participants of the upcoming workshop to be held in July.
If you want to hear more strategies to build belonging, you’ll just have to join us at our next session!
Register for Building Belonging in your Classroom
If you are a casual academic staff member and would like to share and learn from your colleagues to build belonging in your classroom, join us for the next online workshop on Monday 22 July. Please register your interest using the following link:
This workshop is part of the Casual Academic Program and eligible casual staff will be paid to attend up to two of the 90-minute sessions offered in the series.