Belonging and Inequality

Finding My Way: Perceptions of Institutional Support and Belonging in Low-Income, First-Generation, First-Year College Students. About the Author  Darris R. Means is an associate professor at University of Pittsburgh in Educational Foundations, Organizations, and Policy. He earned his Ph. D at North Carolina State University in Educational Research and Policy Analysis with a concentration in Higher Education. When he wrote this article, he was an associate professor at University of Georgia. Prior to that, he was a n administrator at Elon University for Elon Academy, a college success and access program for students  with financial need or first generation students. He is currently working on a participatory action research study and a multi-phase study. The participatory research is about factors that support black students’ science degree determination. The multiphase study is about postsecondary education access and success for Black youth and the barriers they face.  ...

A Working or Tentative Title How First Generation Students are Impacted by Social Isolation Topic Description      The most prevalent issue that most people are facing currently is the COVID pandemic. Most people are having to face issues that might have not been so affecting before. The issue for most students and faculty is the transition from in person learning to remote learning. I will be exploring the issue of how social isolation has aggravated the mental health of college students. Furthermore, this paper will help better understand how the transition to remote learning impacted certain sectors of the student population. In addition, due to social isolation these sectors have faced the issue of “belonging” at college. The privatization of public higher education further intensifies this issue because it is a challenge for low income students to prioritize their education during this time where they have additional responsibilities. Research Question How has the tr...

COVID-19 Remote Learning Transition in Spring 2020: Class Structures, Student Perceptions, and Inequality in College Courses About the Authors Alanna Gillis (picture to the left) is an assistant professor at St Lawrence University. She is in the sociology department and graduated with a PhD from UNC-Chapel Hill in May 2020. Gillis does research on inequality in higher education leading to inequality reproduction and examines the behaviors of college students before, during, and after college. Some awards and honors that she received are the Graduate Contributions to the Sociological Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Award,  2020 Tanner Teaching Assistants Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at UNC, the 2020 Wilson Award for exceptional undergraduate teaching from the Sociology Dept at UNC, and the 2019 SAGE Publishing Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award. Laura M. Krull (picture to the right) is an assistant professor of sociology at St. Norbert College in De Pere...

Research Question During this pandemic, many students have had to transition their lives from in-person learning to remote learning. How has the transition affected the student's mental health? How has this transition had a negative or positive effect on college students' mental health? If it has positively impacted, what are some coping methods that college students found most useful during this time? If negatively impacted, how has their poor mental health affected their ability to learn? How has the student's mental health affected the people around them (family, classmates, and faculty members)? Why would students prefer in school learning over remote learning or the other way around? 3 Scholarly Sources  Gillis, Alanna, and Laura M. Krull. “COVID-19 Remote Learning Transition in Spring 2020: Class Structures, Student Perceptions, and Inequality in College Courses.” Teaching Sociology , vol. 48, no. 4, 2020, pp. 283–99. Crossref , doi:10.1177/0092055x20954263. Kecojevic...

Update on where I stand on the intial topic idea After conducting more research, I have decided to continue with the topic that I chose in the intial blog post. The topic that I had intially chosen was about the impact of covid on college student's mental health. I beleive this is a crucial topic that is impacting many college students especially during this time, where they are isolated from others.  Online Research Results  While, researching about this topic I came through some terms that are directly associated with this topic. A term that was constantly used in many articles that is an mental health issue were depression, anxiety, p sychological distress . When I searched up 'depression in college students', most of the articles that appeared were related to COVID. The other key terms had similar results. Wikipedia article titled 'Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic' showed similar key terms that appeared on other articles and not only related to the US,...