CRADLE Seminar Series 2023 #10: The politics of student belonging: storying through words and images скачать в хорошем качестве

CRADLE Seminar Series 2023 #10: The politics of student belonging: storying through words and images

In this seminar, we will present research funded by the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE) on student belonging, which is broadly considered to be a positive foundation for students’ well-being and success at university. We start by presenting a brief history of belonging research in higher education and invite you to think more critically about belonging. Drawing upon empirical data from interviews and video-blogs with 30 students in the UK and Australia, our research highlights how students experience and create multiple belongings. We identify how calls for integrated, uniform, approaches to building belonging in universities are unhelpful. Instead, we foreground the situated and political ways in which students make and curate meaningful and purposeful connections and safe spaces. Our research points to the personalised nature of belonging. We show how individual learners often enact belonging in ways that disrupt or challenge institutional assumptions and expectations. These insights are particularly important in the current higher education context, with universities in many countries, such as Australia, setting ambitious targets to expand the access and participation of students from more diverse backgrounds. We advocate for critical discussions between staff and students related to the affordances of embracing the multiple ways students and staff choose to belong, at different times, and in different spaces.