Rethinking Student Belonging, Engagement and Success: An Equity Perspective

Last Friday I was invited to attend the Australian and New Zealand Student Services Association annual conference and present the keynote on the final day. The organisers (@ANZSSA ; Stephanie Taylor ; Michelle Rogers ) gave ‘carte blanche’ to present on a topic of my choice (brave indeed!). Given that the #UniversitiesAccord final report is currently under development, I focused on deconstructing and challenging some of the ‘cornerstones’ of university student experience: namely student belonging, engagement, and success. This post sums up some of the themes I reflected upon, and are designed to provoke generative discussions rather than present definitive conclusions.?

Terms like belonging, engagement and success are generally used indiscriminately across the higher education (HE) sector, with assumed universal and common understandings. But these are complex and contested concepts. How students themselves, particularly those from equity backgrounds, articulate states of ‘belonging’, ‘engagement’, and ‘success’ within the university setting remains largely absent from HE discourses. Drawing on recent research, alternative (student informed) ways of considering these concepts offers a counter narrative to how belonging, engagement and success inform productive academic outcomes. Challenging assumptions about these facets of ‘the’ university student experience can inform alternative ways to cater to the unique and multifaceted contexts of our equity bearing learners as we contemplate the post-Accord university landscape.

So what might alternative conceptions of belonging, engagement and success look like?

Belonging seems like a straightforward construct but it is far from this, our recent research points to how this is intensely political for example, who in the institution has the power to define what belonging is or what constitutes effective belonging? Students told us in interviews and vlogs - the intensely personal nature of belonging, which is often overlooked in favour of broad measurement or common definitions. These intensely rich reflections led ?us to conclude how:

Belonging is not location specific nor do learners necessarily want to “belong” to a whole university?– a generalised “one size fits all” idea of belonging may actually lead to feelings of exclusion.

(Gravett, Ajjawi & O’Shea, 2023)

High levels of student engagement are equally considered as being key to success and achievement, yet there is ambiguity in the research and literature around what a ‘state’ of engagement is, what influences this state and, the various repercussions of achieving engagement. For example, there is a tendency to consider engagement in simple ‘binary’ ways (i.e. engaged vs disengaged). Perhaps engagement is better understood as a fluid process that may see students engaging in different ways and at varying degrees depending on the stage of the university journey or their modality. This is not a static or fixed state. Engagement or disengagement may happen simultaneously in different domains: changes and shifts arguably occur all the time.

Finally, ‘success’ in HE is another constructed item, with definitions largely relying on the attainment of a necessary volume of knowledge (Sullivan, 2008) or progressing through a degree program in an independent linear and uninterrupted manner (Leathwood, 2006). Our research offered alternative, equally valid definitions of success, that deviated widely from such ‘valorisation of high achievement’ ?(Nystrom et al, 2018, p6). Interviews and surveys conducted with students at the end of their degrees, highlighted how success was variously described as:

??????? Defying the odds

??????? A form of validation

??????? Embodied and emotional

These alternative perspectives do not necessarily invalidate existing understandings of belonging, engagement or success but rather encourage us to constantly question our own and institutional assumptions about ‘taken for granted’ facets of the student experience. I would argue that such ‘critical reflexivity’ is particularly important in the Australian HE sector right now. The recent passing of the Support for Students Policy combined with the Accord final report looming, requires thinking to be ‘outside the box’ to best inform and underpin how student support services are designed and delivered.

?