Student belonging is a hot topic. No doubt you and your teams have, at some point this academic year, sat down to discuss how your institution can boost student attendance, enhance learner engagement and instil a sense of attachment to your university or college in everyone enrolled on your HE programmes.
But it’s tough, isn’t it? Just as you settle on an agreed plan to advance and embed student belonging something new hits, whether it’s the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, or international recruitment shifts.
In almost every discussion on student belonging I have been privy to there has been a question raised about student attendance and whether attendance equates to belonging. I have come to recognise that the answer to this question matters less than the reality of the context we find ourselves in. The necessity of demonstrating compliance with regulation – particularly UKVI – can mean that tracking bums on seats supersedes dialogue about the pedagogic value-added of the classroom.
For many of us, we’re dealing with inherent tensions around losing the narrative on the value-added of the in-person classroom experience when we pivoted to online delivery en masse during the pandemic. Where once we could wax lyrical about lectures and scheduled contact time being the core source of academic debate and the exchange of ideas, and the essence of HE value for money, we are now often demonstrating the value of the university experience in terms of the support offered to learners outside of the classroom.
I would argue there has been a step change in the narrative around the benefit of being on campus for those on in-person courses. Now we demonstrate impact and value-for-money through mental health support, peer-to-peer connectivity in warm welcoming spaces, and a mass of third space staff with expertise in wellbeing (including coaching, sleep practices, sport to enhance learner success, bespoke academic guidance, cultural navigation support, etc.). And while much of this is wonderful, of course, this shift does challenge the baseline principles of educational gain and asks us to think more broadly about the spaces in which HE providers can create moments for student belonging.
This shift asks those of us who work on the professional services and third space side of the institution to take closer stock of our practice. We are all versed in the benefits of students feeling a sense of belonging – which is often condensed into the premise that if students feel a sense of belonging, they are more likely to succeed – but how do we do that? How, in practical terms, can we create a culture shift or a feeling of belonging and mattering amongst our student body – and know we’ve done it?
Practical wisdom
This was exactly the conversation I had with a fellow member of the RAISE Committee, Claire Garden, over a cup of coffee about 18 months ago. We both spoke at length and with great enthusiasm about the activity that was taking place at our respective universities (Teesside University and Edinburgh Napier University) to harness quantifiable measures of student belonging and how we then went about turning this insight into action.
Before our cups were dry, we had decided on three things. Not every member of HE staff who is interested in enhancing student belonging has the time to dig into the excellent but vastly growing body of literature in this field. While theory is good, sometimes people just want to know what works and what doesn’t before they invest time and resources into a student belonging initiative. So we were convinced that the sector would benefit from a Student Belonging Good Practice Guide building on the theory on student belonging but focused on the types of practice that could promote and gauge belonging. So, we set about writing it.
We were commissioned by the RAISE Network to write the guide, knowing that RAISE colleagues share a professional passion to better understand student engagement.Mindful of the great work also happening at Nottingham Trent University, we invited Conor Naughton, student member on the RAISE Committee to the editorial team, ensuring that the guide included both student and staff perspectives – made real through the inclusion of students’ unions’ contributions throughout.
The guide is now published, with free access to all via the RAISE Network webpages. Included within the guide are case studies from Teesside, Edinburgh Napier and Nottingham Trent, an extensive literature review from Christine Haddow, numerous hints, tips and ideas that readers can adapt to their own institution as needed, and an exemplar pre-arrival survey to boot. Our hope is that such a guide will give anyone else working in this space a head start in their student belonging journey. Happy reading!
The RAISE Student Belonging Good Practice Guide is available here. Nicola would like to acknowledge the contribution of Claire Garden and Conor Naughton to producing the guide and this article.
