Notions of belonging and how we can foster it have been high on the sector’s agenda for some time.
Recently, Ben Jackson and Tom Lowe wrote on what it means to become a student, and how we should be mindful to ensure that students are allowed to ‘become’ on their own terms and not try and cram the transition to student into an intense week of orientation.
We must put aside our preconceptions about what belonging (and becoming) mean. We must be willing to move beyond simply creating solutions for the students we were and instead consider the students of today. If we want to understand what it means to belong we need to listen to the students as – with the student population being increasingly heterogenous – conventional notions of what it means to belong to a university diverge.
