Personal Blogs

Interesting article on Wonkhe this morning about getting a better understanding on students' sense of belonging and how to understand it. Several useful articles linked for me to follow up when I'm not so busy marking regarding qualitative research methods and their use in assessing students' wellbeing and belonging.

For me, a massive light bulb moment was hearing Dr Brene Brown (of the vulnerability TED talk fame) explain that belonging is the exact opposite of fitting in. Belonging requires transparency and authenticity and vulnerability. Which are the antithesis of the things we do when we are seeking to fit in with those around us. When we belong we are free to seek to find common ground, when we are trying to fit in we are hiding those parts of ourselves that we fear won't be accepted. 

And I keep thinking about the need to encourage belongingness as opposed to fitting in when it comes to my students. I'm thinking about the intersection of belonging and trauma-informed practice. About the need to promote safety and trustworthiness and empowerment and collaboration. Over the 3 and a bit years I've been here I've had many students who have disclosed PTSD and complex PTSD, autism (which as I mentioned before is highly associated with PTSD) and depression and anxiety. Given that a significant proportion of my students have some level of trauma before they begin with the OU, and those are just the ones that reveal that to me implementing better trauma-informed practices into my teaching and interaction with my students has got to be the right thing to do.

Anyway, on following up the references in a previously read paper, I've found a publication called Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education: A Guide so lots for me to think about and act on.

Stumbled across an older (from this spring) article about the need for belonging to be better woven into curriculum at WonkHE: Time to go back to basics on belonging | Wonkhe

I've been mulling over some of the things that the author touches upon in this article. She writes as if it was a given that students my age (Gen X) would naturally have been able to belong at our institutions and that it is only the onset of new external factors that have caused students to not feel they belong.

I think this is part of the problem with HE. That the current professors and deans and vice-chancellors are those who thrived at university. You don't get to those positions by being like me. And going back to something I learnt about network theory during my studies on H880, students like me are not connected. We do not belong. We do not fit in. The hyper-connected students are the ones that thrive. They get statistically significantly better grades than us isolated 'loners'. They are the students who thrive at university and are statistically much less likely to wrestle with a constant urge to drop out as I did, and I would hazard a guess they are significantly more likely not only to do well but to stay in academia all the way to the top. So the students who thrived because of their strong network are the ones who control and run the universities as we have them today. The other problem with these hyper-connected thrivers is that they are not connected to us loners. In H880 an image is shared from this paper ("Seeing" networks: Visualising and evaluating student learning networks | Request PDF (researchgate.net)). What happens is at the centre of networks are the highly central information brokers. These are your top students. Surrounding them are 'potentially high-performing students'. If they can 'leverage' their connections they can do well. However, they also have connections who have no other connections - these connections who have only one or two connections into the network themselves are 'potentially low-performing students'. If their one connection cannot help them with a problem or does not want to help them - there is no law that all connections are strong connections or friendships - they are in danger of underperforming. The very, very worst place to be is the disconnected student. It's game over for these unfortunate students. And nobody cares about them because they aren't even on their peers' radars.

In fact network theory tells you everything you need to know about why the students who are least likely to graduate out of all the disabled students are the autistic ones. I can look at a network diagram and tell you exactly who the autistic students are.

So here at the OU it's my job to be the connection. I was really, really bugged by how much one of my tutor-groups (as a whole) underperformed compared to the average (or indeed my other tutor-group). It was a real-time, real-life demonstration of what is described in Dawson et al.'s paper. They weren't interacting and their grades were substantially lower.

I'm really pleased with how things seem to be going so far. I had to chase far fewer students to remind them to interact with me this year. And I have referred far fewer to student support due to no response. It's only week 2 but trying to keep in mind the suggestions of the trauma-informed teaching paper I mentioned before and my own knowledge of interacting with autistic students (like me) seems to be paying off currently.