The first year of university can be a vulnerable time, especially for students who describe themselves as shy and who may be reluctant to engage socially. Shyness, which can be closely aligned with social anxiety, often reduces opportunities for students to belong. This paper presents the experiences of two students negotiating experiences of…

Building off seminal works on community including McMillan and Chavis, Lave and Wenger, Graves, and Wenger et al, the Institutional, Program, and Professional (IPP) community framework for online allows students, faculty, administrators, and alumni the opportunity to consider how to support community beyond online courses into programs, the…

Scholarship on how fraternities inform members' sexual identity development is mixed, showcasing the harmful ways these groups affect queer members as well as highlighting the potential they have to be affirming. This narrative inquiry study sought to contribute to this literature by spotlighting the stories of 8 members who identified as…

Research indicates that historically underrepresented college students are more likely to report alienating campus climates which can contribute to decreased sense of belonging and wellbeing. In turn, a lack of a sense of belonging and poor mental health may lead to decreased academic engagement and increased likelihood of attrition. Theoretical…

This paper aims to analyze the impact of body dissatisfaction on communication competencies among engineering college students and to put forth remedial strategies. As body dissatisfaction is still a grey area in research-related communication competencies, the researchers have focused on this arena. Sixty-one heterogeneous participants (male = 30…

Belonging is personal and political. As a fundamental human need, belonging is about self-acceptance and about feeling "accepted" by others. And yet, this process of acceptance is inextricably tied to structures of power that work to include and exclude. Structures of whiteness within higher education systems, for example, relegate…

Purpose: This study identifies gendered disparities among women students participating in work-integrated learning and explores the effects of the disparities on their perceptions on perceived opportunities, competencies, sense of belonging, and professional identity. Design/methodology/approach: A series of semi-structured focus groups were run…

This qualitative, action research study explored how practitioners' understanding of the academic impacts of sexual violence on female college students transformed. The professional development innovation called "SAAIT: Sexual Assault Academic Intervention Training" was designed using the theoretical framework of Transformative Learning…

We use survey data from three four-year campuses to explore the relationship between academic validation and student outcomes during students' first 3 years in college using structural equation modeling. We examine both a psychosocial outcome (mattering to campus) and an academic outcome (cumulative GPA). We find that both frequency of…

This study deals with the academic identities of 13 female Arab students upon their entrance to STEM studies in a university in Israel. Female Arab students in a predominantly Jewish Israeli engineering institution face conflicting narratives regarding their ethnicity, gender, and its relation to possible success in university-level studies in…

Previous studies suggested that university students who are not able to accept themselves tend to develop negative tendency to compare themselves with each other. This study aimed to investigate the role of unconditional self-acceptance (USA) in explaining the association between mattering and social comparison among Malaysian undergraduate…

The purpose of this study was to present a narrative account of one gender-variant music student and his experiences as a music education major at a small private college. The question guiding this study was as follows: In what ways can one transgender music education student's lived experiences and identity development inform discourse in the…

Few realize that, historically, the women elected to serve as "Queens" of Howard University, were often reflections of political, social, and cultural issues of the time. This parade of beauty, intellect, and charm, was an unofficial barometer of where the University as well as the country stood on matters that pertained to cultural…

It is a human fundamental to desire to be valued, loved and respected--to be significant. Social exclusion induce significance loss which elicits a 'quest for significance'--the search for opportunities to re-gain significance. The present article establishes this relation in a laboratory experiment (N = 71, mean age = 28, SD = 10.42, 65% women,…

This interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) studied the acculturation experiences of six adult immigrant students who were enrolled in a local community college adult basic education (ABE) program. The main study question was seeking how adult (ESOL) students perceive themselves and their overall position in mainstream American society.…