Oh boy. Look. I know I said before that I’d do better at blogging more often, but I’ve really not. Although to be fair, I do know for sure that some are viewing this as a blessing. But not everyone! One person has been hanging on with baited breath, awaiting the next update with nervous excitement. Well, maybe not excitement, but to misquote Anna from Frozen, I don’t know whether she’s elated or gassy, but she’s somewhere in that zone. In essence, I was asked a while ago to write a summary post of a book I had just started. I’d bought ‘Belonging: The science of creating connection and bridging divides’ by Geoffrey L. Cohen after seeing some positive posts about it on social media and I was really interested to see what it had to say. We instinctively know that community-building is a key part of our work as lecturers, but I was interested to learn more about the underlying research. I wanted some facts and figures that I could use to better support our work and evaluate the initiatives we were kicking off.
We’d been talking a lot at work over the past few months about how to better support our students through their studies. It is particularly challenging for us at Teesside, as we have a real widening participation focus and the vast majority of our students don’t live on campus but rather commute in. How do you create a sense of community in a dispersed student cohort? In my previous role as Associate Dean (Learning & Teaching) I kicked off a project we called the ‘Sticky Campus’ (which sounds unhygienic but bear with me), in which we took a number of steps to encourage our commuting students to stay with us after lessons in order to get the wider benefit of the HE experience. This included everything from redesigning spaces in our buildings to make them more enticing and useful, to establishing an extracurricular activity scheme.
The benefits of community building on campus are significant, because feelings of isolation are not just a theoretical problem. Throughout the book Cohen goes on to demonstrate how chronic loneliness is damaging the health of people – both mentally and physically. Indeed within the book he presents work that shows how being excluded from activities displayed in those parts of the brain associated with the experience of pain. Further, our bodies activate a threat response to the perception of being alone, which in turn helps to explain the higher rates of cardiovascular disease, cancers and so on in people who feel shunned or excluded. This is something that we have also explored in our previous work ‘Human Identity and Identification’ when we were discussing race. Interestingly, some of Cohen’s research shows that simply sharing details of each others’ lives and lived experiences is enough to address some of these feelings of isolation, since this highlights to us all that people are often experiencing the same feelings, which in turns helps to reduce that sense of isolation, difference and otherness.
Later in the book as he circles around similar themes, Cohen writes that “Time and again, research has shown that it’s our subjective experience of situations, not just their physical reality, that explains much of their power over us.” So what does this mean for us in HE? Well simply that it’s not enough to create situations for connection, our students have to feel and perceive the benefits too. This latter aspect is much harder and I think for me it means that any interventions that we create need to come across as authentic, student-focused, and not too forced.
When I think back to when I was at college, I don’t really remember the organised social events that were bound to have happened, but I do remember afternoons spent huddled round a table covered in snacks playing D&D, or huddled round a table covered in figures playing Warhammer (geeky, I know, but just one of the many similarities between me and Henry Cavill). I remember a lot of huddling. Although we were all studying together, our little community developed organically outside of the classroom and the sense of belonging it created then fed back into our time in classes. Again, this taps back into the wider benefit of going to university. So, although I am generally onboard with Jerry below, it might just be that being around other people is a good thing…
Why don’t we really drum this point home. Have you seen the excellent Welcome to Wrexham documentary on Disney+? Yes on the surface it seems to be about a football team, but really it looks at the wider impact of football on the community. It’s a good place to start if you want to know why I’m so keen for our work here in SHLS to engage with football wherever we can. Anyway, the second episode of season two (‘The Quiet Zone’) featured the story of Millie Tipping who was diagnosed with autism at an early age. It’s very clear in the episode how her connection with the club has allowed her to feel accepted as herself, but also engage with more people in a way that was not expected of her previously. It’s this being part of a community that is allowing her to flourish. Likewise, I was fortunate enough to be invited to the annual MFC Foundation dinner last week. During the evening, we had to vote for our favourite programme that the Foundation supported. These included Roary’s Academy (a programme for children between 2-6), Football Welcomes (a programme the brings refugees and asylum seekers who have fled persecution and war together to play football) and Think With Your Feet (a programme to support people with their mental health). All three were genuinely impactful, and Roary’s Academy was the winner on the evening.
For me, a key aspect of Millie’s story, and those that come out of the work that the Foundation does, is that being part of a community (in these examples focused on playing football) has resulted in those involved surpassing peoples’ expectations of them. When provided with the space and sense of safety a community engenders, they then thrive and become the best version of themselves.
Back to the book then, where there is a fascinating discussion of how the views that teachers’ have of their students actually impacts the attainment of those students. The data suggests that if you believe a student can do well, they have a better chance of actually doing well. But likewise, if you don’t hold out much hope for a student, they are less likely to do well. Clearly, this is hugely problematic when we think of all the ways in which teachers’ perceptions of students can be influenced and I think we can all see which students this phenomena is likely to affect positively or negatively. As a leader in a university committed to widening participation, this is something that we are acutely aware of – as others have shown, even your accent will play into this issue.
Thankfully Cohen’s book also provides us with some potential tools to address all of this. Largely these focus on a couple of approaches. The first is to recognise that we are all (yes, even you and I know how awesome you are) are subject to something called the Fundamental Attribution Error. The FAE (I am not typing that out every time) “refers to an individual’s tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character or personality, while attributing their behavior to external situational factors outside of their control.” We basically need to remember that we don’t know everything that’s going on in someone else’s life, and that all of that stuff may well be affecting their attitude or engagement, and so maybe cut them some slack. But I think we need to go a step further for our students. For sure we need to be aware of the myriad complications in their lives, but if we do that then we also need to put in wraparound support for this, whilst acknowledging that we might not necessarily know the specifics of what that support will be used for. It needs to be flexible and responsive and nuanced. The second thing to take away is that by creating new situations for students and staff to engage in, with new rules and contexts, we can break out of our usual frameworks of thinking and collaborating. I’m a big fan of multidisciplinary hackathons, which I think is an example of this approach.
There’s more to the book than just this, obviously, but this is what resonated with me. If this has piqued your interest, you should dive in to learn more as it’s an engaging read. I even read this instead of playing on my PS5, so there’s probably no greater endorsement.