‘Relationship-Rich Education’: Promoting Student Belonging for Success

A sense of belonging and personal connection can be argued as essential for both staff and students alike regardless of the learning context. In this pandemic era, 'Relationship-rich education' philosophies for universities are considered more vital than ever due to increased online learning (Felten & Lambert et al., 2020). To-date, higher education students' sense of belonging is a concept that has not been adequately conceptualised. The current literature on 'sense of belonging' spans a number of disciplines, with no apparent consensus on definition between these, complicated by the fact that sense of belonging is temporal and context-sensitive such as during COVID-19. Whilst there has been recent studies outlining the student experience of belonging in the online space (Peacock et al., 2020), investigation of teacher/educator experiences have been relatively overlooked. This presentation will present interim findings from the SoE CSSP that explored students' sense of belonging to their education units.