OU blog

Personal Blogs

Kate Blackham

Thinking again about belonging

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Kate Blackham, Tuesday, 12 Nov 2024, 14:41

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.


Permalink
Share post
Kate Blackham

Proactively interacting with students

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Kate Blackham, Wednesday, 6 Nov 2024, 12:26

I'm marking my students' first TMA this week. There's a group project really early on in SM123 and I decided to 'force' them into groups right from the start with the hope of getting them engaged and on-board and (if I'm honest) being a little manipulative and hoping that their sense of responsibility to their team members would give them the oomph to keep going and do the project and not drop out early on. That seems to have worked well, I have lots to mark.

I offered students the option right from week 1 - group or alternative activity (for those whose social anxiety was an impediment). The students were supposed to reply to my personalised email stating which they preferred. Well some of them are not talking to me. So for those I just decided to send them the alternative activity anyway. And you know what, some of them did it.

You see I decided to try it this way, this year, as I'd been thinking about the possible reason for students not interacting with me. I'd assumed that students who were not comfortable working in a group would be comfortable directly contacting me and saying they wanted to do the alternative. I assumed because I don't think of myself as scary that they wouldn't either. But I'm their tutor. I mark their work. I already have the qualification they're working for. Perhaps I am scary after all.

And this idea that maybe I am scary to a proportion of my students has really crystallized for me this week. Especially since I learned of my being blocked. I mean, it doesn't matter what the reason is - it's not the first time I've been unfriended and blocked on social media. I've known people who have lost jobs or whose marriages have broken down who have included me in a mass unfriending. When I announced my autism diagnosis on social media, a woman who had come to my wedding immediately blocked me. Humans rarely make sense, especially to autistics. What matters is our reactions to these events. Autistics feel the sting of social rejection much, much more fiercely and for much, much longer. Somebody else may have been blocked by the same person and just shrugged their shoulders. But I was already relunctant to reach out to people I actually know and hope don't hate me on social media sites before all this happened, so my reaction to that rejection was to just withdraw completely from LinkedIn. 

So I've been thinking I did the right thing in not assuming a lack of interaction from my students was due to a lack of interest. And the extra TMAs this time speak for themselves.

Permalink
Share post
Kate Blackham

Trauma-informed belonging

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Kate Blackham, Tuesday, 15 Oct 2024, 13:34

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.

Permalink
Share post
Kate Blackham

Symbolic violence

Visible to anyone in the world
Edited by Kate Blackham, Tuesday, 15 Oct 2024, 13:33

I've been reading through a fairly recent paper on Australian autistic university students' experiences (URL works for logged-in OU library access only): ‘It’s a symbolic violence’: Autistic people’s experiences of discrimination at universities in Australia - Diana Weiting Tan, Marion Rabuka, Tori Haar, Elizabeth Pellicano, 2024 (open.ac.uk)

Reading the Discussion, several things jump out at me. The mention of the necessity (unsurprisingly) for Universal Design for Learning, which for autistic students seems largely to consist of making lecture and tutorial notes available beforehand and recording lectures/tutorials and providing transcripts. This is already done at the OU for many tutorials.

Another thing mentioned was the importance of using trauma-informed practice and that negating this approach led to academic staff that were lacking in empathy and, ultimately, breaking the law. By using trauma-informed practices lecturerers can support autistic students' empowerment and self-advocacy (things that are hindered in autistic people through no fault of their own).

Anyway, I have not come across the idea of trauma-informed practice when it comes to teaching at any level - although I am painfully aware that many of my behaviours are the inevitable result of unresolved PTSD. (Did you know that it is 'common knowledge' in the psychological profession that 45% of autistics have PTSD? So many papers, so many..) So in the spirit of trying to be the undergraduate tutor I needed but never got, my next job is to find out what the heck trauma-informed practice is so I can ensure a) I'm doing it and b) set up an eSTEeM project to investigate its value as a teaching practice.


Permalink
Share post

This blog might contain posts that are only visible to logged-in users, or where only logged-in users can comment. If you have an account on the system, please log in for full access.

Total visits to this blog: 25948