Creating a Sense of Community in a Large Introductory Sociology Course


Bahar Hashemi, University of Toronto Scarborough

Feeling a sense of community and caring in the post-secondary setting is a key factor in academic success. That sense of community is more difficult to achieve when course enrolments are large (Mulryan-Kyne 2010) and when students are commuters (Chickering 1974; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005), as is the case in our introductory course at the University of Toronto Scarborough. This sense of community was further hampered in our class during the pandemic, as the shift to virtual platforms disrupted the face-to-face interactions among students and with the teaching team. This paper is based on a multiple-stage project, which included 1) a scoping review to determine factors contributing to a sense of community in classrooms, 2) incorporation of selected factors into course design, 3) a survey of students in the course to determine associations between levels of perceived classroom community and teaching practices, and 4) semi-structured interviews with students to further investigate their experiences in the course and their sense of classroom community. In this paper, we report on our quantitative and qualitative analyses and suggest future avenues of research.

Non-presenting author: Kathy Liddle, University of Toronto

This paper will be presented at the following session: