ESA 2024 Meeting Review: Belonging and Identity in Ecology

Discipline-based education research has become increasingly important within ecology. Each year, the annual Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting hosts sessions and workshops centered around teaching and learning in ecology. Much of this research has focused on student outcomes related to knowledge, conceptual understanding, and skill-building, as well as how instructors can support the development of these outcomes (e.g., Klemow et al. 2019, Prevost et al. 2019, Smith et al. 2019). However, there is a need to better understand how we can support the development of affective (feelings and emotions) outcomes in undergraduate ecology education (Ward et al. 2021, Shinbrot et al. 2022).

Sense of belonging has been shown to contribute positively to students' mental health and well-being (Pittman and Richmond 2008, Kennedy and Tuckman 2013, Gummadam et al. 2016), academic achievement and motivation (Freeman et al. 2007, Zumbrunn et al. 2014, Wilson et al. 2015), and institution-level retention (Finn 1989, Tinto 1993, 2017, Hausmann et al. 2009), and it is pivotal for supporting students underrepresented in STEM disciplines (e.g., Estrada et al. 2016, Hernandez et al. 2013, Hurtado and Carter 1997, Marshall and Thatcher 2020, O'Brien et al. 2020, Rainey et al. 2018). Sense of belonging refers to the feeling of being valued, included, and accepted (Goodenow 1993). In the context of ecology, research shows that students who experience a low sense of belonging are less likely to want to pursue graduate studies in the discipline (O'Brien et al. 2020). Further, African American students in ecology experience a lower sense of belonging than their white peers (O'Brien et al. 2020), making this an important issue related to increasing equity in ecology.

This meeting review summarizes an ESA 2024 organized oral session focused on emerging research and practice about belonging in ecology education. In this session, speakers from different types of institutions, career levels, and disciplines presented an array of education research studies and cases of undergraduate programs, field courses, and research experiences that aim to support belonging. Below, we review the session's talks and provide recommendations for future research studying affective outcomes in ecology.

This organized oral session focused on several ongoing efforts to support a sense of belonging in undergraduate ecology education. The speakers demonstrated how field courses, research experiences, and undergraduate networks can be used to foster affective outcomes and make progress toward inclusivity and equity in ecology. The approaches varied in scale, institution type, and student characteristics, illustrating successful efforts in a wide range of contexts.

Here, we highlight several important takeaways from the presentations:

We hope that the organized oral session fosters future discussion and work on the topic of belonging in ecology. At least 50 people participated in the session; through this meeting review, we hope to share the findings with an even broader audience. For anyone who works with undergraduate students in ecology or related fields, these case studies and themes serve as starting points for refining the design and implementation of field education activities. Moreover, this session demonstrates how a sense of belonging can be measured to provide actionable insights for further refinement.

There is an array of promising ongoing research in this area, but more work is needed to support the development of belonging to ecology, particularly for short, accessible field courses and first- and second-year students. Many courses and programs are oriented toward students who have already opted to join ecology majors or who have committed to immersive, longer-duration residential field courses. Field Research in Ecology and Environmental Sciences (White et al.) and ¿field curious? (Brown et al.) are both examples of how student outcomes can be supported in short, weekend-long field courses. However, ¿field curious? (Brown et al.) at UC Merced is one of the few programs that provides these experiences to nonmajors in both STEM and non-STEM disciplines. Short-field courses appeal to a broad range of students, including both majors and nonmajors. It is critical to involve nonmajors in ecological work as 1) it may help students see ecology as a promising career choice and 2) it is important for all students to be ecologically conscious as future leaders in any career/discipline.