Concurrent Session B

Thursday, Nov. 12 – 10:45-11:45 a.m.

What Do We Mean by Belonging? A Framework for Design and Assessment

Chelsie Hawkinson & Rita Sperry | Carolina D

Belonging is one of the most frequently cited outcomes of learning communities, yet it is rarely clearly defined or systematically assessed. This session addresses that gap by examining belonging as both a conceptual and practical challenge in learning community design and evaluation.

While many programs emphasize connection, engagement, and community, fewer articulate what belonging actually means in practice or how it can be measured. This session introduces belonging as a dynamic, context-dependent construct shaped by students’ perceptions of mattering, connection, and support. Drawing on Terrell Strayhorn’s (2019) framework as a guiding lens, participants will explore how belonging operates within learning communities and why it is critical to student persistence and success.

The session will include a brief overview of key dimensions of belonging, highlighting those most relevant to living-learning and linked-course communities. Participants will then engage in a structured reflection activity where they map their current programs against these dimensions, identifying strengths, gaps, and areas of misalignment between intention and student experience.

In another component of the session, participants will work in small groups to translate theory into practice. Using guided prompts, they will:

• Describe how belonging is currently operationalized in their programs
• Identify specific practices that support or hinder belonging
• Draft at least one assessment approach to better capture belonging outcomes (e.g., survey items, focus group protocols, or engagement indicators)
• The session will conclude with a share-out and discussion of emerging themes, with a focus on transferable strategies across institutional types and program models.

This work is particularly significant for the learning communities field as it bridges theory, practice, and assessment. While belonging is often positioned as an outcome, this session reframes it as a design principle and an assessable construct. The strategies developed are adaptable across residential, linked-course, and programmatic learning communities, making the session relevant to a wide range of institutional contexts.

Designing the Conditions Before the Metrics: A Conditions-first Approach to Learning Community Engagement

Greg Dickerson & Brett Holden | Mecklenburg 1

Academic performance, participation metrics, engagement surveys, and retention rates are often used as measures of success in learning community evaluation. Yet these outcomes rarely explain why student engagement occurs and they aren’t fully available to new learning community practitioners. This interactive session introduces a relational, conditions-first approach to understanding, and sustaining, student engagement in learning communities. With the Design Thinking Creative Learning Community as an example, participants will explore four conditions that drive early traction: trust, belonging, momentum, and continuity. These conditions are intentionally designed using principles from design thinking. Attendees will reflect upon their own programs, identify where engagement is limited, diagnose which condition may be underdeveloped, and design a small, practical shift. This framework is applicable across both residential and nonresidential learning communities.

Training Falcons to Fly: Building Career-Ready Criminal Justice Students Through a Learning Community Model

Catherine Pape & Ella Strum | Mecklenburg 2

How do you prepare learning community students for life after graduation? This interactive workshop introduces The Hire Flyers, a structured career development pathway embedded within the Criminal Justice Learning Community at Bowling Green State University. Built around the F.L.I.G.H.T. framework — Field Learning, Immersion, and Growth through Hands-on Training — the program integrates job shadowing, skill-building, and field experiences directly into the learning community model. Participants will explore how to analyze their own student population’s career development needs, map existing courses for integration opportunities, and build meaningful employer and community partnerships. Leave with a concrete action plan ready to implement or strengthen career readiness initiatives within your own learning community, regardless of discipline or institution type.

Quick Talks 2 | Mecklenburg 3

Data Meets Debate: Exploring Sex, Ethics, and Evidence in One Integrated Assignment

Christine Grela & Tim Seitz

Can we approach controversial topics such as sex work and abortion through both psychological research and philosophical argumentation? Can one assignment incorporate data analysis, close reading, and thoughtful analysis while demonstrating the value of two different fields? Integrated assignments can be challenging. After many iterations, we have created an assignment that fully combines both psychology and philosophy/ethics. This session will present a semester-long project that begins as a group data collection and ends in individual papers for a fully integrated learning community focused on controversial issues from our learning community, Talking Dirty, which combines Human Sexuality with Introduction to Ethics.

Civic Skills as Durable Skills in LC’s

Shawn Bowers & Jeffrey Thomas

Coming soon!