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COVID-19 has forced a global emergency pivot to online learning, which has led to increased demand on both educators and learners, with a major impact on workloads, research careers, and mental health. Across the globe, academics complain of burnout, exhaustion, and lack of self-care. This has heightened the concern around the well-being of learners and staff (Czerniewicz et al, 2020; Imad, 2021) and has led to an increase in interest in approaches to teaching and learning that recognise the importance of care and compassion, such as humanising pedagogies (Pacansky-Brock, 2020); pedagogies of care (Bali, 2020) or trauma-informed approaches to pedagogy (Imad, 2021; SAMHSA, 2014; Costa, 2020).

Educators drawing on these approaches are concerned with their learners and their socio-emotional wellbeing. They see learning as happening when we learn in communities and when we feel we belong. Here the learning environment and the way we facilitate learning and community become as important as the course content. As Borkoski (2019) argues,“There is consensus in the literature about the benefits of a student’s sense of belonging. Researchers suggest that higher levels of belonging lead to increases in GPA, academic achievement, and motivation”