Sara de Sousa is a Principal Lecturer with a remit to reduce the awarding gap between Black, Asian and minority ethnic students and white students within Hertfordshire Business School and increase retention and progression across the student demographic. Experienced in teaching, widening participation management, graduate careers advice and academic skills tuition. A Senior Fellow of the HEA, with a Masters degree in Professional Studies (Careers Guidance), currently researching student belonging and transformation at university for a Doctorate in Education.
"An Exploration of Meaning-making around Belonging and Transforming at University amongst Black, Asian and minority ethnic undergraduate Business School students"
Within higher education, it is acknowledged that a sense of belonging is paramount to student engagement which ultimately impacts student success (Thomas, 2012; Kahu et. al. 2022). More recently, the concept of ‘mattering’ (Flett, 2018; Gravett, 2021) as an aspect of belonging has come to the fore, focusing on students’ sense of personal value to staff and peers rather than simply a sense of fitting in with a group. Diminished sense of ‘belonging’ has been linked to poorer academic outcomes for racially minoritized students than for white students in the UK (HEFCE, 2015; Millward, 2021). In addition, post-92 universities seek to provide a transformational learning experience to enable social mobility and increase access, participation and success amongst minoritized, marginalised and non-traditional students, but what exactly does it mean to belong and transform, and how do racially minoritized students make-meaning of these concepts in their learning context?
This study focuses on the lived experiences of racially minoritized undergraduate students within a post-92 Business School in the south-east of England. Exploring the immediate and extended environment of students’ lived experiences through their own photographs and metaphorical interpretations of these, factors which hinder or enable a sense of belonging and/ or transforming are examined and discussed.
Employing an arts-based methodology with reference to decolonising methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) and Critical Race Theory, the study uses photo-elicitation and collage as methods to access deeper reflections on experience and situations which may go unnoticed or be dismissed (Hughes & Giles, 2010), thereby ‘making the invisible visible’ (Samatar et. al., 2021 p4). Through the creation of metaphors, and participants’ own interpretations of these, whiteness and patterns of oppression and resistance are identified using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (Braun and Clark, 2006 & 2022; Terry and Hayfield, 2020).
Whilst the research is contextually situated and conducted in the year post-Covid, the findings will have relevance to all universities looking beyond the headline statistics on ethnicity degree awarding gaps and drop-out rates to understand the lived experiences of students othered as ‘non-white’ in European higher education systems.