MCC Daily Tribune

TCC: Facilitate a Book Group in Fall 2025!

The Teaching and Creativity Center enjoyed a successful academic year, hosting engaging book groups. As the semester draws to a close, we're looking ahead to Fall 2025 and invite you to consider facilitating a book group. If you're interested, please email Melis Kural. Stay tuned for the Fall 2025 Program Participation Form, which will be shared with the campus community soon. As always, your ideas are welcome – please feel free to reach out!

The Teaching and Creativity Center is excited to announce that the book "The Impact of a Sense of Belonging in College" has been selected as TCC's annual book for the 2025-2026 academic year. We are looking for a facilitator who would like to lead the book group. Please review the information below and contact Melis Kural (mkural@monroecc.edu) if you are interested in facilitating the book group.

The Impact of a Sense of Belonging in College – TCC is Calling for a Book Group Facilitator

Sense of belonging refers to the extent a student feels included, accepted, valued, and supported on their campus. The developmental process of belonging is interwoven with the social identity development of diverse college students. Moreover, belonging is influenced by the campus environment, relationships, and involvement opportunities, as well as the need to master the student role and achieve academic success. Although the construct of sense of belonging is complex and multilayered, a consistent theme across the chapters in this book is that the relationship between sense of belonging and intersectionality of identity cannot be ignored and must be integrated into any approach to fostering belonging.

Over the last 10 years, colleges and universities have started grappling with the notion that their approaches to maintaining and increasing student retention, persistence, and graduation rates were no longer working. As focus shifted to uncovering barriers to student success while concurrently recognizing student success as more than solely academic factors, the term “student sense of belonging” gained traction in both academic and co-curricular settings. The editors noticed the lack of a consistent definition or an overarching theoretical approach, as well as a struggle to connect disparate research. A compendium of research, applications, and approaches to sense of belonging did not exist, so they brought this book into being to serve as a single point of reference in an emerging and promising field of study.

Melis Kural
Teaching & Creativity Center
04/29/2025