As a sector, we are still navigating a disaster recovery period.
We must understand how the COVID-19 pandemic and its successive lockdowns have forever changed students’ relationship with the physical campus.
Students now study against a backdrop of a cost-of-living perma-crisis, global conflict, and a struggling NHS. So how can universities help students to feel part of a community that can combat these negative pressures and, in so doing, entice them back to campus?
Build together
In a Wonkhe article Charlotte Boulton argues that students are experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, Wonkhe’s Belong stats give quantitative evidence of this, and Wonkhe’s Jim Dickinson suggests that the sector must consider student loneliness, and its implications for engagement, mental health and outcomes.
We need a radical shift in thinking and practice to resolve these issues and to support students’ well-being. In their report, Embedding Wellbeing into the Curriculum: A Global Compendium of Good Practice, Advance HE recommends that academics work with other teams, including wellbeing services, to support students best and build engagement.
In this article we suggest that this involves seeing our roles as academics differently and working in teams with staff from across the university, including librarians, careers and employability colleagues, enterprise teams, student welfare and support teams and academic developers.
It involves valuing all staff and, in particular, recognising the value of practitioners and professional services colleagues working alongside academic staff on the design and delivery of modules.
The second element of our approach, and one that involves both a shift in mindset and practice, is about understanding a university education as a third space; a place for social interaction and transformation. This is not to say that already overworked, burned-out staff should be doing more, but rather that we should be doing things differently. We need to be adapting our teaching to the changing needs of students.
The RAISE Network Student Belonging Good Practice Guide and the Wonkhe/Pearson 2022 report Building Belonging in Higher Education speak about the importance of belonging in the classroom and the role of group work in students developing a sense of belonging and community.
We have extended these principles about community and purpose, mixed them with some work that has already been published around relational management education., We are now developing a suite of approaches that implement this philosophy.
Grand offering: Grand Challenges
Our focus so far has been around how we can do more with what we already have: working cross-faculty with partners and embracing a holistic team of academic staff and professional services colleagues working together to enhance the student experience. One of our formative experiences of this was demonstrating the possibilities of cross-faculty approaches to embedded employability.
Other notable examples include facilitating traditional extracurricular activities within modules. At the University of Liverpool, the careers team worked with the Civic Data Cooperative and Everton in the community to give students the ability to research ideas to support communities with the cost-of-living crisis. The “Play Your Part” challenge empowered students to be active citizens, working together to provide solutions.
With the diversifying demographic of the student cohort and the cost-of-living crisis, it is worth noting that more students are in paid employment than ever before. The “full-time student” is now something of an anachronism. According to the 2023 HEPI/Advance HE Student Academic Experience Survey, there are now more students in paid employment than not.
It is important that all students, including those with caring responsibilities, commuting students, disabled students and international students, are exposed to these opportunities within timetabled classes.
Building on the success of our grand challenge approach and the importance of working with Liverpool City region as a place, we have developed it in a first-year research methods module involving 272 students. The Civic Data Cooperative has set students the challenge of researching the impact of digital inequalities of residents in Liverpool. Students work in small teams to identify their research problem, quantify the problem using qualitative and quantitative data, and, using their entrepreneurial mindset, suggest a product, service or initiative that will act as a potential solution.
Social justice enterprise
This problem-centred approach to learning ensures that students are confident in transferring their knowledge and skills to different settings and contexts and using collaborative inquiry to define and solve real-life issues. They are encouraged to work as “study pods” outside of timetabled classes, and to offer and accept peer support. They then feel more confident entering a classroom already knowing their peers.
Our data shows that attendance and engagement have improved using this approach. Giving students a tangible problem that they investigate, using their research methods training, means that students are more motivated to attend, support peers, and develop their ideas. It also gives students an awareness of and commitment to social justice in action. Students have praised that this opportunity is “real” and have said that it has given them motivation to help the community.
This social justice enterprise also showcases the value of teaching and research to the wider community, many of whom are not exposed to the traditional activities of universities. Such partnerships raise the profile and possibilities of university collaborations.
What Next?
We are committed to the principles of interdisciplinary, collaborative, and relational learning and to building community and belonging. These form an integral part of the curriculum transformation project currently underway at the University of Liverpool, as we look to extend current good practices and pilot new ideas.
We know that to build student communities and belonging we need activities that build skills, networks and confidence, and that have a clear pathway towards graduate outcomes.
We are not working in the pre-pandemic context, and this mindset must be explicitly acknowledged in new curriculums. We know that physical spaces matter – especially to our students who have experienced trauma, grief and distress that will impact us for the rest of our teaching careers; disaster recovery is a long process.
We cannot realistically expect the levels of student attendance of the pre-pandemic period. We need to embrace radical change to meet the new and ongoing needs of students and think about how we scaffold learning using the digital tools gained during lockdowns, and understand the treasured space of campus and being together in person.
