<\/p>\n
Back in July, I gave a brief presentation at the University of Leicester\u2019s Annual Learning and Teaching Conference.\u00a0 Based on some stuff I’d been reading and had been on my mind for a while, the presentation sought to problematise notions of \u2018belonging\u2019 and \u2018resilience\u2019 in contemporary higher education (HE). This was in response to the conference call for contributions which identified \u2018belonging and resilience\u2019 as a key theme. In the end, I don\u2019t think I did a particularly good job of the presentation at all (please don\u2019t alert any of the students I regularly advise on how to plan and deliver effective presentations!). However, a recent conversation with <\/em>Dr Emma Parker<\/em><\/a> (<\/em>Associate Professor (Reader) in Postwar and Contemporary Literature,<\/em> and also Equality and Diversity Champion for the College of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities) \u00a0concerning how she and colleagues in the College might stimulate discussion and practice-development around questions of equality and diversity in the curriculum, has prompted me to return to the material and give it another go on here. Below, then, is a slightly edited transcript.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cHello and thanks for coming along to this presentation. For those who haven\u2019t met me, my name is Steve Rooney and I\u2019m a learning developer based in the Leicester Learning Institute. I suppose there are lots of different ways I could define what Learning Development (LD) is about, but I’m going borrow my definition from an editorial<\/a> by John Hilsdon (2013) who described learning development as being interested in the \u2018how we do things around here\u2019 elements of higher education study, and how these are \u2018likely to affect inclusion or exclusion, success or failure, or to advantage or disadvantage certain groups of students.\u2019 What this means to me is that LD is concerned with the ways in which different disciplinary and institutional contexts set certain parameters and \u2018rules\u2019 when it comes to who is recognised as a \u2018legitimate\u2019 participant and, by extension, who is not – or, more usually, who has the most work to do in order to secure their recognition.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, it’s a conception of learning and what it means to learn, that sets itself against what I would argue is a reductive notion of ‘study skills’ \u2013 which seems to assert that successful participation in HE is a question somehow acquiring and applying a set of mysteriously generic, neutral, context-independent ‘skills’ (such as ‘essay writing’ or ‘critical thinking’ or \u2018independent learning\u2019 skills). Alternatively, LD as I understand it insists these practices must be understood as complex and context-specific social practices which participants develop as part of a broader process of becoming a particular kind of scholar with particular orientations towards knowledge and towards themselves as a producers of knowledge.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alongside this, LD has also always produced, and drawn on, more critical insights which seek to problematise and interrogate the various norms and conventions that prescribe how knowledge should be produced, what counts as legitimate knowledge, what a suitable ‘academic voice’ sounds like etc. When we talk about student learning, the argument goes, we\u2019re always also talking about questions of social and institutional power (see, for example, Burke, 2008; Inohue, 2015; Lillis & Scott, 2007; Sinfield et al<\/em>. 2011; and John\u2019s editorial referred to above).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So what I want to do briefly, here \u2013 and drawing on some of the\u00a0critical scholarship\u00a0regarding participation in HE \u2013 is to look at how\u00a0we might approach, more critically and reflectively, questions of ‘belonging’. And this is going to culminate in presenting a set of questions that to my mind this scholarship raises.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To begin, then, with why the question of belonging is worth reflecting critically on in the first place:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Belonging connects matter to place, through various practices of boundary making <\/strong>and inhabitation which signal that a particular collection of objects, animals, plants, germs, people, practices, performances, or ideas is meant `to be’ in a place<\/strong>.\u2019<\/p>\n (Mee and Wright, 2009)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n The quotation above reminds us that belonging anywhere is intricately bound up with boundaries which mark out who, or what, is meant to be here in the first place. In social settings like universities these practices of boundary-making are, of course, inescapably linked to broader social structures and practices \u2013 of exclusion and inclusion, recognition and misrecognition.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Burke and Crozier, for example, highlight that coming to belong \u2013 or to be recognised<\/em> as belonging \u2013 is to come to perform particular types of identity. What is more, these can often be presented as socially neutral norms from which certain groups of students might be positioned as deviating from, or displaying a certain \u2018lack of\u2019:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ‘Gaining access to higher education often depends on demonstrating particular attributes and dispositions. These are embedded in an esoteric framework, requiring that the student decode legitimated forms of academic practice\u2026. [T]o achieve in higher education, the \u201csuccessful\u201d student must first understand how to write, speak and read in ways\u2026 recognized as legitimate forms of practice<\/strong>\u2026 Academic practices are usually presented as neutral, decontextualized sets of technical skills and literacy that students from socially disadvantaged backgrounds are often seen to lack<\/strong>\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n (Burke and Crozier, 2014)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n What I think scholarship like this reminds us of is that our own practices of boundary-making and recognition \u2013 regarding the kinds of behaviour and ways of being which signal \u2018belonging\u2019 \u2013 are themselves worthy of critical reflection. When we talk about belonging or its lack, we need to turn our gaze upon ourselves and how we might signal to students (maybe often unintentionally) just what it means to belong around here. As Burke and Crozier go on to explain:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Work on \u201cOthering\u201d developed by Black feminist scholars\u2026 theorize the ways that embodied intersections of gender, class and race <\/strong>re-position some bodies as dependent, subjective, emotional and potentially dangerous and contaminating<\/strong>, whilst others or constructed as autonomous, objective, rational and \u201cproper<\/strong>\u201d citizens\u2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Students from \u201cOther\u201d backgrounds are often characterised then through a range of deficit disorders<\/strong>, including lack of confidence and are positioned by gendered, classed and raced constructions. In this view, confidence is a signifier of a legitimate position as a university student and is framed as a neutral, decontextualized and disembodied trait that \u201cnon-traditional\u201d students lack.\u2019<\/p>\n (Burke and Crozier, 2014)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n So, let’s look briefly some examples of research into how some students have made sense of their experiences. Below are a couple excerpts from research by Gagnon and Lillis, respectively:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Audrey [research participant] discusses being very aware of the fact that her accent did not belong<\/strong>. She endeavoured to erase her accent by training out her use of the glottal stop and instead practised pronouncing her Ts so that she might no longer be seen as \u2018uneducated\u2019, \u2018inferior\u2019, and \u2018dodgy\u2019. Many of the women in this study, like Audrey, discussed trying to hide, change, soften, or \u2018lighten up\u2019 their accents<\/strong> so that academia might find them more suitable.\u2019<\/p>\n (Gagnon, 2016)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018\u2026In a discussion about writing in academia she [Mary, a Black working class student] compares the difficulties she faces to that of a white middle class student in the same course:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t have to make a switch. It\u2019s him you see. Whereas when I\u2019m writing I don\u2019t know who it is <\/strong>(laughs). It\u2019s not me. And that\u2019s why I think it\u2019s awful, I think it\u2019s awful you know. It\u2019s not me at all<\/strong>. It\u2019s like I have to go into a different person. I have to change my frame of mind and you know, my way of thinking and everything. It\u2019s just like a stranger<\/strong>, it\u2019s like I\u2019ve got two bodies in my head, and two personalities and there\u2019s conflict.\u2019<\/p>\n (Lillis, 2003)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n In both these cases, then, students who may be positioned \u2013 or perceive themselves as being positioned \u2013 as \u2018other\u2019 from an assumed norm, felt compelled to disguise or even erase aspects of themselves in order that they may \u2018belong\u2019 \u2013 or at least, appear to belong. Belonging as performance, for Audrey and Mary, is very much one of appearing as unlike themselves as possible.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n In a similar vein, colleagues from the University of the Arts London led a project recently in which students produced photos and minimal textual comments to capture their experiences of studying and ‘belonging’ in HE (Suka-Bill and Taylor, 2016). In one image a student photographed herself in front of a mirror, and then \u2018lightened\u2019 this image, in order to symbolise the perceived necessity of performing a version of herself she feels is radically other from herself.\u00a0The photograph was accompanied by the words:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018When I look at my work I should be able to see myself\u2026 not a version of what someone else has decided is important.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Suka-Bill and Taylor, 2016)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Such insights reveal just how complex the question of belonging can be, and how potentially violent the costs of belonging may well also be for many students. (It’s also worth acknowledging here that education is a far too complex and contradictory endeavour to ever produce a single or consistent set of \u2018outcomes\u2019 or experiences. There’s no such thing, after all, as ‘the<\/em> student experience’; we can only ever meaningfully speak of students’ experiences<\/em>). As an aside, it’s perhaps also worth noting that Audrey, Mary and the student quoted above would all be counted as contributing positively to their respective institutions\u2019 retention and diversity data. Apart from anything else, I think this highlights why such data do not provide us with adequate proxies for something as complex and as socially mediated and negotiated as belonging.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, if we understand belonging simply as something an individual can be helped to achieve or perform, we are in danger, I believe, of neglecting to reflect on how we \u2013 at disciplinary and broader institutional levels \u2013 establish the terms of belonging and how far those terms may be implicated (even unwittingly) in relations of power and in practices of exclusion and symbolic violence.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Linked to this, I think, is a danger that belonging \u2013 like academic \u2018success\u2019 or \u2018employability\u2019 \u2013 comes to be defined predominantly or exclusively along individualist and individualising lines. I was struck, for example, how for this conference, the theme of belonging was conjoined with that of ‘resilience’ \u2013 a term which has become closely aligned with the broader neoliberal ideal of the competitive, human capital bearing self.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As Will Davies has written, within a contemporary context of increased economic insecurity and precarious employment, the discourse of resilience works to place responsibility very much with the individual. In this way, the structural bases of many of the inequalities that our students face in contemporary society become re-framed as individual deficits and failures of ‘resilience’:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Individuals are trained and \u201cnudged\u201d to live with certain forms of economic uncertainty, in the assumption that they personally need to become more \u201cresilient\u201d in the face of unexpected shocks to their careers, pensions and domestic lives.\u2019<\/p>\n (Davies, 2014)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n