SRHE Blog

The Society for Research into Higher Education

Tag Archives: belonging


by Leave a comment

When research becomes an intervention: Insights from the Student 2025 project

by Ria Bluck

Within higher education, targeted interventions are used to improve the student experience, engagement, and academic outcomes. These initiatives tend to focus on increasing a sense of belonging, students’ confidence in their learning activities, and enhancing attainment. In some instances, these interventions are specifically tailored to support student groups which are underrepresented in higher education or are more likely to face challenges within their academic experience.

The Student 2025 project is an innovative four-year longitudinal project which follows the undergraduate journey of 100 students at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Designed to capture the intricacies of the student experience, the project gathers data through conducting interviews and surveys with each participant three times a year.

Interestingly, the Student 2025 project itself appears to mirror qualities of an intervention in its own right. In the most recent data collection, where many of our students were due to graduate, the research team explored whether their participation in Student 2025 had affected their experience at NTU in any way. Students told us that they thoroughly enjoyed taking part in the project and that their involvement had positively affected both their university experience and their personal development. While the positive effects of taking part in research are widely recognised, the extent of the benefits reported by Student 2025 participants was particularly noteworthy.

Development of self-reflection skills

Most students in the sample found that Student 2025 had given them a space to reflect on their time at NTU in a way that they would not have done without the project. Having dedicated time to reflect helped them to understand their skills development, progress, and achievement over the course of their undergraduate degree – encouraging them to take note and be proud of their work.

Students also shared that reflecting on their experience each term enabled them to identify areas where they were struggling or that could use improvement. This regular reflection allowed them to be critical about what they could do better and what support they would need to get there. Having consistent interviews, often with the same interviewer, also created a sense of accountability. It encouraged some students to make changes as a result of their reflections, leading them to take proactive steps to improve their university experience. Not only did Student 2025 give students the opportunity to self-reflect, it also facilitated the development of self-reflection skills, helping them to do this more effectively.

Developing confidence

Several students shared that Student 2025 had considerably boosted their confidence. For some, this sense of confidence related to their overall experience at NTU, while for others, it centred on their social engagement and future prospects.

One student explained that they had joined Student 2025 to actively develop their public speaking skills. By their final term at university, they reported feeling much more comfortable speaking with others than when they first started at NTU. As well as this, a few students had gained confidence in using Microsoft Teams to communicate with others. One student highlighted that taking part in regular online interviews for Student 2025 had helped them to get used to this type of environment, boosting their confidence in their post-university job search.

An increased sense of belonging

A large focus of Student 2025 was to gain a deeper understanding of how students experience a sense of belonging at university and how this affects their undergraduate journey. It was therefore particularly interesting that students felt they had gained a greater sense of belonging at NTU as a result of their engagement with the project.

Participants told us that the project had made them feel more connected to the university, that they were a part of something meaningful, and were valued by NTU. A significant factor in this was how the project facilitated students in feeling heard and provided them with the opportunity to share impactful feedback. The team also worked hard to keep participants in the loop with the progress and impact of the project for this reason.

“Student 2025 has also added to my feelings of belonging and being valued at NTU, all in all a positive experience, I’m grateful to have taken part”.

An enhanced level of support

Many students in this project highlighted the therapeutic benefits of talking to someone who had no connection to their course or personal circumstances. Having an unbiased contact at the university provided a non-judgemental space where students could freely discuss their personal challenges in great detail.

Despite being experienced researchers, we participated in additional training, such as meeting with Student Support Services staff to learn how to best support students in distress. We guided students to think deeply about their experiences, signposting them to support where we felt it was necessary. Some students told us that, because of Student 2025, they had been able to reach out to services that they were previously unaware of – actively improving their access to NTU services, with the Student 2025 project acting as an extra layer of support.

How can the sector learn from Student 2025?

We anticipated that this project would produce a great number of impactful findings that would enhance our understanding of the undergraduate experience at NTU. What we did not anticipate was that the methodology itself would have such an impact on the students’ university journey.

The impact of Student 2025 on participants has exceeded expectations, with some sharing how it has been the highlight of their university experience and feeling extremely proud of their involvement. They have also developed a strong sense of care for the project and its potential impact, feeling that they have taken the time to advocate for students at NTU and have helped in enacting positive change for students like them.

“This has been a highlight of my university experience. It has helped me in becoming more reflective as an individual and recognise how much I have progressed. Taking part in this has made me proud of myself and I am grateful for the opportunity.”

The higher education sector could learn a great deal from the Student 2025 project, and the way it has enhanced the university experience for these students.

Longitudinal research is resource-intensive, but using elements of its methodology within interventions could replicate its benefits without the need for further extensive research. For instance, this could serve as an opportunity to reconsider how personal tutoring is used on courses, prioritising reflective activities that foster both a space for personal development and course feedback. Or how mentorship programmes could be introduced to enhance the experience of specific student groups.

It is clear that students value consistent and personalised interactions with staff members throughout their university journey. Finding ways to embed this could enhance student confidence, a sense of belonging, and self-reflection – as has been reported within the Student 2025 project.

Ria Bluck is an Educational Research and Evaluation Specialist at Nottingham Trent University with a breadth of experience exploring disparities in student experience. Her work has primarily focused on researching topics of wellbeing and inclusion in higher education, using student voice to enhance the experiences of students from diverse backgrounds.


by Leave a comment

Teaching for Epistemic Justice in a Post-truth World

by Kathy Luckett

In Teaching in Higher Education’s recent special issue on ‘Experts, Knowledge and Criticality’ (2019) we noted in the editorial that traditional forms of expertise and epistemic authority are under threat. In his subsequent blog, Harrison warned: “Higher education is in danger of sleep walking into a crisis”.

In this post-truth era it is useful to be reminded of Castells’ (1996, 2010) warnings about the crumbling of liberal democratic institutions, which he predicted would become ‘empty shells’, devoid of power and meaning in the ‘information age’ (2010:353). As early as 1996 he warned that the ‘network society’ would bypass the rationalising influence of civil society institutions (include here institutions of higher education). Castells also predicted a related loss of influence for the old ‘legitimising identities’ based on roles located in civil society institutions – such as those of experts and academics in universities and research institutes. The information and communication technologies of the fourth industrial revolution have huge potential to democratise flows of information in open spaces on the web and strengthen civil society, but Castells’ corpus shows how this ‘communication power’ is caught in the contradictions of the global capitalist market. Nation states have limited power to regulate information flows on behalf of their citizens, while control of communication power now rests in the hands of global corporations such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon and Apple which are driven by market rather than democratic logics.

At a cultural level, individuals’ access to mass communication via social media has led to ‘communicative autonomy’ and the emergence of radical forms of individualism which undermine older identities based on tradition or citizenship of sovereign nation states (Castells 2010, 2012). Despite the decline of these older forms of solidarity, those individuals who participate in the wealth and power of the global economy feel recognised and included in society, but those who do not feel excluded and misrecognised. Because the latter groups no longer feel (or never were) included as full citizens of civil society, they are taking up ‘resistance identities’ put out on social media. Resistance identities are invariably based on subordinated groups’ sense of misrecognition and exclusion from the mainstream and tap into axiologically charged ‘structures of feeling’ (Rizvi, 2006:196).  In some cases, the construction of resistance identities draws on fundamentalist or essentialist notions of culture, ethnicity, religion or place. More generally, resistance identities create a sense of belonging by appealing to individual attributes, authentic experience and/or personal pain and trauma. On social media these attributes become reified as new cultural codes, captured in new images of representation and commodified for display. Castells (2010) describes these as closed fragmented identities that fail to connect or transcend into broader forms of human solidarity.

This analysis by Castells is useful for thinking about the recent student protests on South African campuses (2015-2017). Student activists in the #RMF (RhodesMustFall) and #FMF (FeesMustFall) movements creatively used multi-media platforms to spread their message, organise protests and perform their politics, creating new anti-establishment resistance identities and cultural codes. In a post-settler society such as South Africa, where identities remain highly ‘raced’, the contradictions of global capital alluded to above are played out through a race-based identity politics that pits ‘blackness’ against ‘whiteness’. Undoubtedly the assertion of ‘blackness’ by black students and staff, particularly on historically white campuses, was a consequence of their continued misrecognition and exclusion by the ‘whiteness’ of institutional cultures and practices, a generation after South Africa’s political transition (the long shadow of ‘coloniality’). In such neo-colonial contexts, the frustration and anger of black students from poor homes and schools is exacerbated by their continued exclusion from academic success and from the promise of employment in the global economy and the relief from poverty that this guarantees. What also became apparent during the protests was the students’ rejection and dismissal of authority based on the old ‘legitimising’ identities of civil society – such as those of university executives, senior managers, academics and government officials.

In such post-truth contexts where the liberal democratic order is dissipating and our own roles and identities are no longer naturally legitimate, the challenge for academics is how to connect with our students and teach in ways that address their concerns and issues. I suggest this means teaching for epistemic justice. What does this mean?

In the editorial for the special issue (Harrison and Luckett, 2019) we argued that we should work with the destabilisation of modern epistemology and its problematic blindness about the relationship between power and reason. We noted the capacity of digital technologies to open up previously protected boundaries around knowledge production – to include historically excluded and silenced knowers and their ways of knowing. However, we also advocated that we teach our students how to use the epistemic rules, criteria and norms developed by expert communities of practice for validating truth claims. The promotion of epistemic justice involves showing students how to move beyond naïve scepticism and judgmental relativism about truth claims and how to become active and critical participants in processes of knowledge production. The articles in the special issue include creative ideas and strategies on how to give students the tools to judge truth claims for themselves.

I believe the degree to which the academy is prepared to work at promoting epistemic justice – not only on campuses but also on digital platforms – will be reflected in our students’ capacity to judge old and new truth claims for themselves. The achievement of greater epistemic justice in curricula and pedagogy in higher education institutions could empower students to refuse capture by the communicative and axiological power of closed, potentially authoritarian forms of resistance identities. Social and epistemic justice entails the freedom to choose to dis-identify from fixed social identities and encouraging students to work with identity as a process of becoming who they hope to become in a complex heterogeneous public sphere.

Here are a few questions for further reflection:

  • What are the implications for our teaching of the fact that students are highly ‘mediatised’ and may not recognise our expertise and authority as legitimate?
  • When students take up resistance identities do we acknowledge that this is invariably a consequence of their feeling misrecognised and excluded?
  • To what extent do our institutional policies that claim to address equity, access, diversity and inclusion, assume assimilation and compliance? To what extent do they challenge given hierarchies of power and unequal patterns of participation in the academic project?
  • Do we articulate for students our own social and historical locations, acknowledging their political salience for our academic work?
  • In our curriculum development, how far is it possible to challenge the hegemonic grip of the North over knowledge production? Do we, wherever possible, promote a ‘pluriversal’ approach to knowledge that includes making space for new cultural codes, new knowers and alternative ways of knowing?
  • Do we teach students to critically historicise and contextualise the development of the modern disciplines and thus question false claims to universality?

Kathy Luckett is the Director of the Humanities Education Development Unit and Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a member of the Review Board for Teaching in Higher Education.

References

Castells, M (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Rise of the Network Society Volume I Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Castells, M (2009) Communication Power Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Castells, M (2010) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. The Power of Identity. Volume II (2nd edn) Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell

Castells, M (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age Cambridge: Polity Press

Harrison, N and Luckett, K (2019) ‘Experts, knowledge and criticality in the age of ‘alternative facts’: re-examining the contribution of higher education’, Teaching in Higher Education 24 (3): 259-271

Rizvi, F (2006) ‘Imagination and the Globalisation of Educational Policy Research’ Globalisation, Societies and Education 4(2): 193-205