Social and Academic Integration in the Virtual Classroom: Techniques to Foster Community, Belonging, and Retention

Stacie A. Miller, MA, Sara N. Osman, MA, and Jessica L. Farrar, MA

From the English for Speakers of Other Languages Program, School of Literacy, Languages and Writing, Community College of Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland.

Stacie A. Miller, MA - Corresponding Author
smiller@ccbcmd.edu

ABSTRACT

In this article, we, as 3 faculty members in the English for Speakers of Other Languages Program at the Community College of Baltimore County, reflect on our experiences of transforming online and remote classrooms into a community during the pandemic and examine the literature that underscores how classroom community and belonging contribute to student success. We share research on 3 engaging learning activities that have successfully built this community among students in our own virtual classrooms: hall of fame, discussion boards, and jigsaw readings. Although what we share is rooted in our experiences as English for speakers of other languages faculty in the context of a large community college, we have chosen activities that can be applied in various contexts to foster community.

INTRODUCTION

On March 10, 2020, over coffee and muffins at our local Panera Bread, the 3 of us met to discuss building online curricula for our ESOL courses. Little did we know that this would be our last face-to-face meeting for over 2 years, or that within the next 24 hours, the need for online curricula would increase exponentially! Little did we know how desperate students would soon be for a sense of connection and belonging during the uncertainties and isolation of a pandemic. Over the next weeks and months, as we scrambled to move our courses online, we discovered the great degree of community that can grow in virtual and online classes. We researched and experimented with ways of purposefully creating conditions where students feel a sense of belonging, striving to make the online classroom a sanctuary that values students’ backgrounds and encourages cross-cultural understanding. This review article highlights how community and belonging contribute to retention and student success and explores research on successfully implementing 3 specific online activities and their impact on students’ educational experience.

Our Students’ Backgrounds

In any community college, “community” plays an integral role; the sense of community on campus and in the classroom relates to the mission of serving the needs of the greater community. In 2022, our college—the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC)—served a total of 48,084 students with 23,396 credit students (CCBC Quick Facts, 2022; Kelleher, 2022). Of these credit students, 61% are students of color, making our college a majority-minority institution (CCBC Quick Facts, 2022). This diversity is further increased by 340 international students on an F1 visa and 1,467 non-native speakers, (CCBC Quick Facts, 2022).

Our students, like community college students everywhere, tend to juggle many responsibilities. Nearly half (49%) of all CCBC students work 20 hours or more per week (CCBC Quick Facts, 2022), and thus have many obligations competing for their time and energy. Only 12% of our students enroll directly from high school with most students (57%) falling between the ages of 20-39, and 54% of our students need some type of remediation or preacademic work before beginning credit-level classes (CCBC Quick Facts, 2022). These challenges make a supportive classroom community, which contributes strongly to student success and retention, even more important (Kaye et. al., 2011; Kuh, 2007; Tinto, 2017).

Social and Academic Integration: Community, Belonging, Retention

When 16 award-winning university faculty were interviewed about their concept of classroom community, many emphasized the importance of social and academic integration, or “social interactions in the classroom [that] serve to build both relationships and knowledge” (Kay et al., 2011). This emphasis on cognitive learning separates classroom community from other types of community, and yet the classroom should expand beyond the intellectual horizon, creating, as one professor said, “an emotionally rich experience” (Kay et al., 2011). Overall, these professors strove to create a “classroom community in action: students interacting with each other and the instructor about course content” (Kay et al., 2011). For the purposes of this article, we use this basic definition of classroom community as academic and social integration, as we examine ways of creating an online class community that promotes a sense of belonging. While we draw on our experiences as English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) instructors teaching virtually, the pedagogical practices we highlight can be applied to any discipline and any modality; they are broadly useful for reducing feelings of marginalization and creating spaces where students feel they are valued members of a community and are helpful first steps toward student success.

Closely related to classroom community is the concept of belonging; reminiscent of the 16 award-winning faculties’ definitions of community (Kay et al., 2011), Maestas et.al (2007) cites several articles asserting that “academic and social integration” are “key components of belonging.” While both community and belonging are connected to academic and social integration, belongingness has strong roots in the pursuit of equity. Terrell Strayhorn (2018) defines belonging as “students’ perceived social support on campus, a feeling or sensation of connectedness, and the experience of mattering” to their peers, teachers, and others on campus. Without this, students risk experiencing what Walton and Cohen (2007) refer to as “belonging uncertainty,” a feeling that “people like me don’t belong here” and that “contributes to racial disparities in achievement.” Individuals from minoritized groups and first-generation college students, who have often been marginalized in society, may feel such belonging uncertainty on a college campus; creating an atmosphere of belonging has a crucial, lifelong impact on students’ lives.

In fact, belonging uncertainty may impact students even before their second semester, at the inflection point of determining whether they will continue with college. Social and academic integration, the root of classroom community and belongingness, plays a significant role in persistence and retention. Tinto (2017) emphasizes that a sense of belonging is a key factor in determining student persistence, and that the chances of completion increase when “students come to see themselves as a member of a community of other students, academics, and professional staff who value their membership.” Being part of this community increases the student’s confidence and motivation to engage, another significant factor related to persistence. Based on a National Survey of Student Engagement, Kuh (2007) asserts that engagement, defined as “the time and energy that students devote to their studies and other educationally purposeful activities” has a positive impact on grades, persistence, and success. Building community is a significant part of increasing student engagement, and Kuh (2007) emphasizes that the classroom should be “the locus of community” that focuses on cooperative learning and other community-building activities. For community colleges, it is particularly important that classrooms of all modalities promote engagement and belonging, as a myriad of responsibilities often prevents students from seeking additional ways of engaging with the college.

To create a community that instills a sense of belonging and ultimately leads to student success, the classroom – online and otherwise – must become a safe space where students feel a level of comfort and feel empowered to voice equity concerns (Hamilton & Reis, 2005). The ideal classroom could be a “public homespace,” described as “places where people support each other’s development … members go on working to make the whole society more inclusive, nurturing, and responsive to the developmental needs of all people – but most especially to those who have been excluded and silenced” (Belenky, Bond & Winestock, 1997, cited in Hamilton & Reis, 2005). To accomplish such a homelike acceptance in an educational setting, faculty should play the role of community builders in the classroom where they “create an agenda for learning, common caring and grace; support voice, visibility, and sense of mattering; and help community members discover individual and shared possibilities” (Roper, 2020). There are several strategies and techniques that can build such a sanctuary in a virtual environment, a sanctuary where students feel seen and heard and know that they matter.

Online Community-Building Techniques

In his presentation on “Learning Communities in Times of Crisis,” Roper (2020) stated that crises bring opportunities to “re-imagine, reinvent, and re-create.” Using our experience from teaching learning communities and knowing the value of belonging to student success and retention, we worked from the start of the pandemic to “re-imagine, reinvent, and re-create” the online classroom as a refuge where students felt that they belonged and mattered as the world was in upheaval. To do so, we strove to create Garrison’s “community of inquiry,” which emphasizes the importance of “social presence,” “cognitive presence,” and “teaching presence” for a successful online learning experience (Garrison et al., 2000). We experimented with online techniques of building community, and in this section, we suggest variations on 3 practical techniques to build classroom community in the remote or online classroom of any discipline. Though these techniques are not new, we explore their usefulness in promoting community and relevance in remote and online classes after the dramatic shift in instruction during COVID-19.

Student hall of fame

One technique that can establish a community atmosphere between the teacher and students from the beginning of the semester is the student hall of fame. In the student hall of fame, the teacher selects examples of insightful student responses from recent assignments and compiles them in a presentation to share with students. The teacher may choose student work that illustrates a common or unique viewpoint, an exemplary solution to a problem, or any display of skill that relates to the course or assignment objectives. The presentation format could be as simple or creative as the instructor wishes. Adobe Spark and video messages have been our students’ favorites. For examples, please see https://express.adobe.com/page/ryR7dhFWEyeSy/ (Farrar, 2022a) and https://express.adobe.com/page/3Boc3phJx6zZv/ (Farrar, 2022b).

By highlighting examples to share with the whole class, students see a snapshot of how others are doing or feeling in the course. This helps them form a connection with their classmates and get a sense of their group that is often lacking at the outset in the online setting. Students often state that seeing peers’ comments about the difficulties of an assignment validates their own feelings and makes them feel like they belong, realizing they are not the only ones overcoming challenges in the course. Likewise, when they see examples of their classmates’ work, it can help them believe they are capable of doing it themselves and gives them a better understanding of the expectations for completing future assignments.

At the same time, students whose work is shared not only earn recognition for their exemplary work or ideas, but also see how their individual work contributes to a greater common goal in the class, by helping their classmates – through their academic and non-cognitive development – be more successful in the course. Thus, to help all students feel this sense of pride and community membership, it is important to include work from a variety of students and highlight contributions of those who may need some encouragement. Students who may especially get a boost from public recognition include those who are not typically praised in class, who experience stereotype threat, whose performance overall is not stellar, or who Barkley (2010) describes as “hav[ing] developed chronically low expectations and numbed acceptance of failure; […] whose failure attributions or ability beliefs make them susceptible to learned helplessness in failure situations; [… or] who are obsessed with self-worth protection.” We assert that such students may have better outcomes with targeted and authentic praise through hall of fame acknowledgements.

However, it is necessary to observe that not all students respond to praise positively or wish to be publicly singled out for their work. Barkley (2010) mentions students from collectivist cultures, in particular, may not want to serve as models for their classmates, but we advise getting to know students as individuals over relying on cultural stereotypes. Instead, we recommend asking individual students their preferences about sharing their work in general and in relation to a particular assignment to avoid negative reactions or feeling pressured by the teacher-authority, as this is counter to the intention of the activity and would work against building supportive relationships and classroom community.

As alternatives, we offer 2 other methods for implementing this technique. One method is to allow students to recommend others for inclusion in the next hall of fame, which may promote a feeling of connection and active reading of classmates’ work. Some professors offer small incentives, such as bonus points, for nominating classmates to increase student participation and motivation. This option could also work well in assigned groups for larger classes, where students view and recommend others from within their smaller groups instead of looking at many contributions from the whole class. Another option is to have students choose something they are proud of from their own work to share with the class, as in Barkley’s gallery of achievement (Barkley, 2010). This puts students in more control of what they share and promotes reflection and evaluation of their own work.

However the hall of fame is applied – and indeed, it should be applied with student preference and comfort in mind, and the teacher should ensure that all students are acknowledged – this activity can provide students with the experience of “mattering” as Strayhorn (2018) and Roper (2020) express is necessary to create a sense of belonging. Students realize that their work is valued by the group. The online classroom becomes the “public homespace” where the teacher and students “support each other’s development” (Belenky et al., 1997) and acknowledge each other’s wins. The hall of fame, like our next activity, discussion boards, can each play a role in creating an online “public homespace” by giving voice to “those who have been excluded and silenced” (Belenky et al., 1997).

Alternative discussion boards

A second technique to start building community early in the course and deepen it as the semester continues is the discussion board. This well-established online activity incorporates the 3 community of inquiry components of teaching presence, social presence, and cognitive presence (Garrison et. al, 2000) to develop the sense of community in asynchronous courses (Covelli, 2017). Early in the course, discussion boards are a useful tool to build the foundation of classroom community: an environment where “students are comfortable, feel welcome, and can connect with others” (McKenna et al., 2022). From the first post in which students introduce themselves, instructors should promote interactions that help the learners develop close relationships in the course. Later discussion boards can then build a deeper level of community that facilitate student engagement in more “rigorous discourse and dialogue, and build[ing] camaraderie through participation in casual, or nonformal, social interactions” (McKenna et al., 2022). In this way, discussion boards pose an ideal balance of social and academic integration necessary for community and belonging in the online classroom.

McKenna et al. (2022) identify the key elements of discussion board structure for instructors to consider as the prompt, expectations and guidelines, incentives for participation, instructor facilitation and guidance, and tone of the interactions and argue that “social and/or personal content, internal references, and personable/casual tone” in the discussion posts are indicative of classroom community. In particular, prompts should be “thought-provoking, open-ended, and [permit] many correct answers.” We recommend providing guidelines that encourage substantial responses to classmates, sharing personal experiences, problem solving, and advice.

However, with many classes shifting online or increasing the asynchronous online component, it is easy for students and faculty to experience discussion board overload. To counter this, there are several alternatives to traditional discussion boards that faculty could offer to breathe life back into this valuable course component. Some possibilities, which are addressed in more detail below, include changing the nature of the prompt and using media-based discussion.

Reflective discussions

The objective of traditional discussions is often to engage with the course content, with a secondary objective of class interaction. However, traditional discussions can result in superficial or formulaic interactions instead of the academic and social integration that builds classroom community. An alternative that suited us well during the pandemic was reflective discussions such as the following:

Please take a few moments to reflect on your learning and experiences this week. You may write or record your responses. Check that your answers are clear and thoroughly explained.

  1. Finish the sentences. "I used to think” and “Now I think."
  2. What was most interesting or helpful about this week’s class?
  3. What was something challenging or unclear about this week’s materials/assignments and why?
  4. Respond to at least 2 of your colleagues with polite, insightful, and helpful comments that further the conversation. Add new and specific ideas in each post.

Reflective discussion boards provide students the opportunity to share knowledge, offer help, and uplift one another. For example, Student G responded to a classmate, I know that essay writing is difficult if you don’t know how to organize them. It wasn’t easy for me to but I scheduled and met a writing tutor. She told me how to organize my work, next time you can schedule and see one of the tutors. They will direct you on what to do. In this reply, Student G connected with her classmate by revealing her own challenges with the week’s assignment, identified a specific area that her classmate may have been struggling with (essay organization), recounted a positive experience with a campus service, and encouraged her classmate to seek support. In another response, Student K posted, I totally agree with you. I had no idea that there were various rules for citing other people’s writing. Anyway, this class was very helpful for me, knowing the rules to use when citing other people’s writing. I also received a lot of feedback from my teachers and thought I should review and check what I had studied so far. He shared that he had similar insights as his classmate about the expectations for citing sources from the week’s course materials, practice activities, and assignment feedback that led him to transform his thinking and revise his previous work. He also showed his appreciation for his classmate’s ideas, commenting, Thank you so much for letting me read something that resonates with me.

Perhaps most importantly, interactive discussion boards provide opportunities for students to become friends without ever having met in person. In one of Student S’s responses, she liked that discussion boards allowed students to share our knowledge and understand each other and added that it is a good area where we can make friends. Through these interactions, students see that they are not alone in their challenges and their classmates will support them, eliminating feelings of belonging uncertainty (Walton & Cohen, 2007). As evidenced above, these interactions build their social capital and sense of belonging.

Discussion boards can provide a safe space in an online class, where students can build friendships with a diversity of peers as they share information about their own cultures and backgrounds. Strayhorn (2018) suggests that sense of belonging increases when students are socializing with peers whose backgrounds may differ from their own. As Student L commented to a classmate in one discussion board, [I]t is really interesting to know about your country’s ethnic groups and language. This is one of the best things of our class to know about each other language and culture. Kay et al. (2011) found in their interviews with award-winning professors that community encourages exposure to alternative viewpoints and exposes students to in-depth sharing that involves feeling both safe and challenged. As a result, discussion board prompts can provide impactful opportunities for students to share their background and experiences (according to their comfort level) which gives them voice [and] visibility (Roper, 2020).

Multimedia discussions

In discussions where students work on course content or assignments, alternatives to the traditional text-based fora may rely on multimedia to add richness. Covelli (2017) notes that in general, “audio and visual elements […] add texture and personal elements to the discussion [… and] work to humanize the classroom.” Many options exist for incorporating multimedia. Students could find or create images or music and explain its connection to the course content. They could include videos or create screencasts. They could create word clouds or present work in Adobe Spark or Microsoft Sway to add visual interest. Some learning management systems (LMSs) have options for audio and video recordings directly in the discussion forums or students can upload recordings or link to other sites. Beyond the LMS, there are many easy-to-use websites where multimedia discussions can take place, such as Flipgrid, VoiceThread, Padlet, and Jamboard. Recent research from a variety of disciplines (e.g., Chen & Bogachenko, 2022; Delmas, 2017; Erickson, 2020; Isidori et al., 2021; Kirby & Hulan, 2016; Lowenthal & Moore; Stamps & Opton, 2019; Yeh et al, 2022) has shown these platforms, especially Flip and VoiceThread, to be more effective at creating classroom community and more preferred by students than text-based discussion boards within the LMS.

One platform that can be integrated into online courses is GoReact. With this video software, students can record videos of themselves, their screen, or both; they can also view and comment on each other’s video recordings. One of the major advantages of GoReact is that the instructor and classmates can make multiple comments throughout the video so that the feedback corresponds directly with a specific time in the video. This platform can be integrated into the LMS so that students don’t need to login to another site; they can record and view videos all within the LMS. For example, students in an online ESOL course created and recorded presentations to show their learning from a module about laugh therapy. One student shared his love of the cartoon Tom & Jerry in his presentation and advised the class to watch silly cartoons like this. One of his classmates commented I like the examples of your advice. Tom & Jerry is one of my favorite cartoons when I was a kid. It really helps in making laughter. Here the students connected on a personal level.

GoReact is especially useful for screen casting and giving multiple comments, but students can also utilize the audio or video options built into the LMS discussion board, like in this example from an online ESOL course:

In this discussion board, you will record yourself asking and answering questions using this module’s vocabulary.

Beyond audio and video, students can also connect through personal pictures. In this example, students share images to connect to course content and with each other:

To activate our background knowledge about our new laugh therapy module, please create a post in which you:

  1. Share a picture of you, your family, or your friends smiling, laughing, or happy. Or share a more general picture of a happy time. Describe the picture and explain the feelings related to the event or time in the picture.
  2. Discuss how you feel when you look at this picture.
  3. Discuss the effects of smiling and laughing on your body and mind.
  4. Reply to at least 2 classmates with meaningful responses that show you connected with their ideas or picture.

Before offering multimedia discussions, it is important to think about their impact on all learners. Accessibility should be a primary concern when choosing alternative discussion boards, so as not to inadvertently alienate/exclude any members of the class. All images should have alt text, audio clips should have transcripts, and videos should have captions. The major LMSs have built-in accessibility checkers to assist with this, although they may not check all forms of multimedia; some external platforms, such as VoiceThread, have accessible versions. In accordance with universal design for learning (CAST, 2018), we suggest offering choices for expression and communication so learners can participate in ways that best meet their preferences and needs. Ultimately, paying close attention to accessibility will contribute significantly to a sense of community and belonging through the use of multimedia.

Whether through reflective or content-focused discussions, online fora are activities that “cultivate an atmosphere in which a group of strangers will listen attentively to others with respect, and challenge and support one another to previously unimagined levels of academic performance” (Kuh, 2007). In addition to the many benefits for students, these alternative discussion forums are inspiring and rejuvenating for faculty as we watch these students develop authentic voices and achieve new academic heights.

Jigsaw

One all-time favorite collaborative technique that strengthens relations among diverse groups (Williams, 2004) and promotes deeper community in the classroom is the jigsaw. In this 2-stage activity, illustrated in Figure 1, students first work in “expert” groups and later form “jigsaw” groups.

Figure 1. Student assignments in jigsaw groups.

Stage 1: expert groups

In the first stage, each expert group is assigned different content, and students work with their expert group to help each other fully understand the material. For example, they complete a reading on a particular topic and make sure everyone in the group is comfortable explaining that topic or sharing ideas from the source with someone who has not read it, which leads to the next step of the activity.

Stage 2: jigsaw groups

For the second stage, the expert groups disband, and one member from each expert group convenes to form a new jigsaw group. Here, they share their expert group content with students from each of the other expert groups. In this way, all the students are exposed to all the topics from the first stage of the activity.

To support motivation, there should be a task after the learning occurs in the jigsaw groups for which students need the information from all expert groups. At a minimum, students could complete a worksheet filling in information about each topic or take a quiz, but ideally students would use the information for a new and more substantial or authentic purpose either individually or with their jigsaw groups. Barkely (2019) suggested that it may also be helpful to have a class debrief or survey after the jigsaw activity to solicit student reactions and to improve future jigsaws. See Figure 2 for an example of a graphic organizer used for a reading jigsaw activity.

Figure 2. Example of a graphic organizer for a jigsaw reading activity.

Jigsaws adapt well to remote and online learning. For remote synchronous instruction, breakout rooms are an ideal way to form different groups. In these rooms, students can screenshare to collaborate on the task. In an asynchronous course, teachers can assign groups through a tool in the LMS or through discussion boards or wikis. For either synchronous or asynchronous modalities, expert group members can fill in a shared cloud document that they each use in their subsequent jigsaw groups.

There are several reasons why jigsaw readings are an excellent activity for both community building and learning. For one, students are well supported in their expert groups. They have opportunities to talk through the material, pose questions to their groupmates, brainstorm ways of teaching their content, and rehearse their explanations and examples before meeting their jigsaw groups. Second, teaching and interacting are effective ways to learn. Each student is responsible for teaching others in the jigsaw group which “requires an understanding of the subject matter beyond surface learning” (Barkley, 2010). Thus, each student is in a situation where the jigsaw group is relying on them to share the information and answer their questions. They are also responsible for the information shared by other jigsaw group members, so they should be encouraged to ask clarifying questions and make connections to content from other expert groups. Since everyone must share their expert group’s content, success depends on no one member of the jigsaw group dominating the discussion. Through these “positive, non-superficial interactions with others” (Williams, 2004), students recategorize classmates from other backgrounds into their in-group, improving their view not only of the individual classmate but of that classmate’s racial-ethnic group altogether.

Third, students remain engaged in the jigsaw group, as the information is different from what they have already worked on, but necessary to complete their final task. In the end, they have worked actively with their teams, achieving both a sense of communal success and personal contribution to the group, making jigsaws a technique that promotes an advanced level of classroom community (McKenna et al., 2022) and interdependence (Barkley, 2010; Tomaswick, 2017). In Chang and Benson’s (2020) study of using jigsaws on cloud platforms, they reported positive effects on classroom community stemming from “collaboration in terms of group learning, individual learning in a group, and social connectedness.” In addition to building deeper community, such an activity lends itself well to developing critical thinking skills such as communication, problem solving, analysis, and synthesis.

The techniques discussed in this review—the hall of fame, alternative discussion boards, and jigsaws—are 3 class activities that can be used to foster community, belonging, and persistence throughout a course in any discipline or modality. Such activities can and should be continued post-pandemic in the important effort to provide refuge from the ongoing challenges in students’ lives.

CONCLUSION

“Positive interpersonal, peer interactions increase students’ sense of belonging and sense of belonging to student success so those charged with increasing college student success should think just as much about campus climate and policies governing social interactions as they do about predictive analytics, intrusive advising, curricular alignment, and early alert systems. It all really matters” (Strayhorn, 2018).

Strayhorn mentions measures to strengthen student success that many of our colleges are implementing, yet there is no single remedy for magically increasing completion and retention. Creating community and belonging is a significant step towards achieving the goals not only of institutions but, more importantly, of individual students. For community college students who face competing demands in their lives and who may encounter an unkind world, a safe, respectful, and accepting classroom—whether online or in-person, during the pandemic or after—can have a tremendous impact on their success. In this article, we have shared our research and experience with online techniques which can be applied to a variety of disciplines and contexts. Suggestions for future research include the lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on community, belonging, and persistence in higher education in all modalities; the correlation between success rates and classroom community in general and in online courses in particular; and other pedagogical techniques and technologies that can be used to foster social and academic integration in synchronous and asynchronous online classrooms.

At our Panera meeting on March 10, 2020, we began discussing online curricula that ultimately extended far beyond cognitive learning, with an emphasis on community and belonging during a time of social upheaval. Three years later, while working on this article, we met at Indian Delight restaurant in Catonsville, Maryland. As we enjoyed Indian specialties and delighted in each other’s company, we felt the comfort that resulted from our past interactions and shared experiences, the same feeling we wish for our students. After all, logging onto an online class should be as welcoming for our students as sitting down with friendly colleagues over a tasty treat!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank our colleagues in CCBC’s Accelerated Learning Program, whose reflective discussion board prompt we adapted for use in ESOL and subsequently included in this publication. Additionally, we acknowledge CCBC’s Faculty Scholarship Group, whose members provided valuable feedback on an early draft of this manuscript. Your suggestions helped us refocus and strengthen our work and find an appropriate outlet. We are grateful for your support and value your commitment to collaboration and scholarship.

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