“I Feel Like I Belong in This Class”: Belonging in the Asynchronous Online Composition Classroom

Abstract

The rapid expansion of online education in community colleges highlights the challenge of fostering belonging in asynchronous online composition courses. This qualitative, exploratory, embedded single-case study examines how community college students perceive and make sense of belonging, drawing on a design logic at the intersection of Hall’s theory of cultural communication and Garcia’s servingness framework. Of 175 participants across two sequential online composition courses (August 2023–May 2024), 100 submitted responses to the Week 12 check-in assignment analyzed here. Participants made sense of belonging through six themes: the class was “made for me,” a “safe space,” feeling “seen” by the instructor, a sense that “we’re a community,” being “pushed” to grow, and a recognition that the online format itself changes how students communicate. Because check-in responses were shared only with instructors, the peer-related theme reflects self-reported connection rather than observed interaction. The findings suggest that check-ins deliberately designed with culturally responsive practices, including flexible, open-ended prompts, may support students’ belonging within an inherently low-context medium. Given the exploratory design and the absence of a comparison group, these findings are best read as suggestive, offering a starting point for designing community college online composition courses around cultural communication and servingness.