Higher education has long known the many challenges facing Black students at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) leading to lower Black student retention rates relative to their White peers. One factor contributing to retention rates among Black students at PWIs is their sense of belonging. There are many factors that contribute to a sense of…

Decades of research demonstrate that young children make meaning about race and racism. Yet there remains a dearth of scholarship about whether and how African American children are thinking across racial and ethnic difference to make sense of systemic inequities. Moreover, there are but a handful of scholars who have documented the ways that…

The cognitive and performance benefits of group work in undergraduate courses depend on understanding how to structure groups to promote communication and comfort while also promoting diversity and reducing conflict. The current study utilized social network analysis combined with self-reported survey data from 555 students in 155 groups to…

The purpose of this self-study was to investigate the implementation of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) in the music classroom without a district-level music administrator. With two guiding research questions, the study involved using culturally responsive music education and a community of practice to implement DEIB music…

This study explores how children construct their belonging in culturally diverse early childhood settings in Finland and Iceland. Belonging is understood as a holistic phenomenon that is constructed through various relations. The study is a multiple-case study, influenced by ethnographic approaches, conducted with children in two preschool…

Background/Context: Community colleges are seen as malleable institutions that work closely with high schools, vocational programs, employers, and community organizations to provide an education for all members of their local community. As an extension of the community, the education provided must address larger social changes (i.e., Affirmative…

Structural oppression continues to be one of the most pressing problems in U.S. society, and college students have always played a major role in addressing systemic inequities. Yet, much remains to be learned about the experiences of students advocating social justice in higher education, and there is a paucity of research on Asian American…

This article analyzes the cultural explosion of "28A," the largest national strike in Colombia's recent times. It aims to further understand the protest from the point of view of young artists that went out to protest. Following analytical tools borrowed from the performance studies, I bring a decolonial approach to the performance…

Despite increasing scholarly interest in the phenomenon of quality culture, the existing literature is largely silent on or ambiguous concerning how to realise such a quality culture. In this paper, insights from the field of socio-technical systems design (STSD) are used to explore how to enhance a quality culture. STSD seems to be able to add to…

The goal of this literature review was to identify evidence-based curricula that support youth mental health with special attention to inclusion of access, equity, and belonging (AEB). Four databases were searched for peer-reviewed articles published between 2010 and 2019 related to youth mental health curricula. A total of 1446 articles were…

A quarter of all US students are immigrants, children of immigrants, or immigrant-origin youth. In this article, we examine how school practices can either support or hinder these students' feelings of belonging. Given the important relation between students' feelings of belonging and a range of academic, motivational, and socioemotional outcomes,…

Western modernity has shaped people's thought patterns and value hierarchies, relegating humans to the position of supremacy. This anthropocentric worldview has disconnected humans from the rest of nature and eventually led to the social and ecological catastrophe. This paper shows that collective memory work can help us recognize how we are…

The aim of this study was to develop and validate a psychometrically-sound instrument to assess students' perceptions about class cohesion. Two studies were conducted. In Study 1, four steps were established: (1) development of the Class Cohesion Questionnaire (CCQ); (2) item selection; (3) item compression; and (4) exploration of psychometric…

This study examined students' encounters with and responses to poverty-based experiential learning during an undergraduate sociology class. Students' academic readings and experiencing real-life context were channeled through reflective analysis of public policy's implications. Students' writing, which had reflective and diagnostic elements, was…

This critical action research study demonstrated the importance of creating liberatory learning environments for Black and Brown student scholars through culturally relevant pedagogy. Decolonization paradigms were employed to understand the impact of colonization and how it currently influences educational structures for Black and Brown students…