Belonging is built in seminars, not slogans

This week, Dr Stuart Grey discusses belonging and student voice evidence: why international wellbeing, friendship formation, and collaborative study are shaped by ordinary academic contact rather than slogans or one-off events.

The episode covers everyday community engagement, friendship and collaborative study, DfE franchise arrangements guidance, Jisc's new "None of the above" option, and practical ways to read comments about belonging as evidence about curriculum design, wellbeing, and confidence.

In This Episode

Why belonging often depends on small, repeated points of contact in teaching.
How international student wellbeing is shaped by routine engagement with staff, peers, and the wider community.
Why friendship formation and collaborative study put belonging inside course design.
What DfE franchise arrangements guidance means for comparable student feedback evidence across delivery partners.
How a "None of the above" option can improve survey data quality when answer sets do not fit.
A practical way to sort belonging comments by the kind of action they require.

Student Voice Practice

Belonging evidence becomes more useful when teams read comments by what they reveal, not only by the words they mention. A seminar comment may be evidence about teaching delivery, confidence, peer connection, and wellbeing at the same time. The practical task is to separate provision problems, participation problems, and relationship problems so the right team can act.

Research Spotlight

Across the Sector

From the Archive

Practical Takeaway

Map belonging comments by action route before deciding the intervention. Some comments point to seminar design, some to group work structure, some to staff contact, and some to timetable or cohort stability. Treat belonging as a design parameter, then take the map into the programme team meeting.

Full Episode Page

https://www.studentvoice.ai/podcast/episodes/014-belonging-is-built-in-seminars-not-slogans/

Subscribe to The Student Voice Weekly: https://www.studentvoice.ai/blog/newsletter/

Transcript

Hi, and welcome to Student Voice Weekly. I'm Dr Stuart Grey, founder of Student Voice, and today I'd like to talk about belonging, and why it so often rises or falls on everyday contact, the small repeated moments in teaching that decide whether students feel part of the place.

Belonging is a word universities use a lot. Strategies, campaigns, events. But when you look at what students are actually saying in comments, it's much more practical and much more ordinary. Do you know who to sit with in a seminar. Can you ask a question without feeling exposed. Does anyone learn your name. Do you have a reason to speak to the same people twice. Are staff interactions human, predictable, and easy to access.

In my part-time teaching you can see this in real time. Two rooms can have the same content and the same slides, but totally different student experience. The key thing is the social design of learning. Who speaks, who stays quiet, whether students feel they have permission to participate, and whether the course creates natural routes into peer connection.

In the main story this week, I want to pull together two research signals that point in the same direction, and then turn them into things you can actually do with feedback.

The first signal comes from Hannah Soong and Guanglun Michael Mu's paper, "International student wellbeing and everyday community engagement experiences: an Australian study". It is qualitative research on international student wellbeing, and a theme that comes through strongly is this idea of being socially peripheral. Support services can exist, induction can happen, workshops can run, and students can still feel outside the everyday community of the course.

What matters here is how students experience support. Universities often think in terms of provision. Have we got the service. Have we got the web page. Students experience it as access plus comfort plus confidence. Can I walk into that space without feeling like I'm intruding. Do I understand the unwritten rules. Do I have someone to go with. Can I contribute without worrying I'll get it wrong.

And the research points you back to everyday engagements. Small routine interactions with staff. Low stakes contact with peers. Familiarity built over time. Those are the conditions that support wellbeing. The big welcome event is fine, but it does not compensate for a day to day academic life that feels isolating.

So here's the practical implication for UK universities. When international students say, I don't feel confident speaking in class, or I don't know how to approach lecturers, or group work is awkward, or I feel left out, you should treat that as wellbeing evidence and learning evidence, not just "social experience". If you are peripheral, you take fewer academic risks. You ask fewer questions. You avoid office hours. You keep your head down in group tasks. Then continuation risk rises and attainment gaps become more likely. The comment was an early signal.

The second research signal comes from Kseniia Vilkova, Oksana Dremova and Irina Shcheglova's paper, "The power of friendship and study collaboration on the development of students' sense of belonging: A three-year longitudinal study at Russian universities". The study finds that friendship formation and collaborative study are strong predictors of belonging. That matters because a common institutional reflex is to locate belonging mainly in extracurricular life, societies, and events. Those help, but the research keeps pulling you back to the course itself.

If you want belonging to be more than a slogan, make sure the curriculum creates repeated opportunities for students to meet, talk, and work together in ways that feel safe. Make sure those interactions happen early. Once a student settles into a pattern of being alone, it can be hard to reverse.

So what does that look like in practice. Seminar formats where students speak to each other, not only to the tutor. Group tasks that are designed, with roles, expectations, and support, not just assigned. Stable small groups long enough for trust to form. Clear norms about participation so quieter students, commuter students, and international students know what "good" looks like without having to guess.

Now, across the sector, there are two updates this week that change the evidence burden for student experience teams.

First is the Department for Education guidance on franchise arrangements in England. It reads technical, but it will land quickly in quality and student experience work. With registration requirements for larger franchised providers and key decision points coming, lead providers will need to show they understand and can evidence the student experience across delivery partners.

The practical consequence is comparability. Can you look across partners and spot patterns early, using the same definitions and the same tools. Module evaluation themes, complaints, reps, open comments. If your categories and question sets differ by partner, you end up with noise and you lose the ability to act before problems escalate.

So if you're in a lead provider role, make sure you have a consistent feedback framework across partners, and make sure changes to surveys and coding are logged. Otherwise you will argue about whether an outlier is real, when the real issue is that you measured it differently.

Second, a smaller change with immediate impact on data quality. Jisc Online Surveys has added a "None of the above" option to multi answer questions. That sounds minor, but if you've ever analysed survey results where respondents were forced to pick something even when nothing fit, you'll know how quickly you can generate misleading patterns.

So if you use Jisc templates locally, make sure you update them consistently and record when the logic changed. If you do year on year comparisons, measurement changes can look like performance changes.

Let me bring this back to student comments, because this is where teams can make fast progress.

When you read comments about belonging, international experience, and wellbeing, try sorting them by what they are evidence of, not only what they mention on the surface. A comment like "seminars are intimidating, people don't talk" often gets filed under teaching delivery. But it can be evidence about belonging and confidence. "Group work is stressful" might be evidence about assessment design and also about peer connection routes. "I don't know anyone on my course" is a social statement and a curriculum design statement. And "staff are friendly but I still feel outside" is a warning sign that provision exists but integration is not happening in the learning environment.

The risk is bundling all of this into a broad "community" theme and then struggling to act. Actions sit in different places. Seminar facilitation. Group work design. Participation norms. Timetabling and cohort stability. Staff development around inclusive interaction. Those are all very practical levers.

One point that keeps coming up, especially for international students, is language confidence. Universities often route that straight to skills support. Students often experience it as a relational barrier. If you worry you'll sound wrong, you avoid speaking. If you avoid speaking, you struggle to form friendships and study partnerships. So when you see "language" in the comments, make sure you also ask what the course is doing to make contribution normal and safe.

A practical exercise to try this week is a quick audit I call "routes into connection". Take one programme, ideally a large first year, and map the first four teaching weeks. Where exactly are students required to interact with peers in a structured, low stakes way. Where will they meet the same people more than once. Where is there a reason to exchange contact details. Where do staff set participation norms clearly.

Then take a sample of your existing student comments and test them against that map. If students report isolation and your map shows almost no structured interaction until later in the term, that's a design outcome. If students say they only made friends in one specific type of class, that tells you where connection is already working, and where to invest.

If you can, take that map into a programme team meeting. Keep it constructive. The point is to make belonging visible as a design parameter, like assessment load or contact hours, and to use student comments as evidence of where the design is helping or hindering.

Alright, that's it for this week. The full links and summaries are in the newsletter. You can subscribe at studentvoice.ai. And if this episode was useful, please could you follow or subscribe to the podcast, share it with a colleague working on teaching or student experience, or leave a quick review wherever you listen. It helps more of the right people find it.