Conference Program

Student ‘belonging’, ‘engagement’ and ‘success’ are terms generally used indiscriminately within the higher education (HE) environment, often assumed to have universal and common meaning. However, how students themselves, particularly those from equity backgrounds, actually enact belonging, engagement and success is largely absent from university discourses. Drawing on recent international research (Gravett et al, 2023; O’Shea, 2021; Stone & O’Shea, 2024), this presentation will interrogate these concepts, recognising how each is a constructed entity and presents a particular worldview. This presentation is designed to provoke discussion about how assumptions concerning the enactment of belonging, engagement and success could be challenged to better reflect the unique and complex contexts of HE students who are from under-represented groups. In doing this, we recognise the relationality within transformative pedagogical approaches, particularly how students bring with them a diversity of knowledges and experiences that need to inform and underpin higher education systems.

The research featured includes qualitative data collected from Australia, the UK and also Europe, with students who self-identify as being from a range of ‘equity’ groups. The participants were all enrolled in a HE institution and the majority were undertaking undergraduate studies. Collectively, the findings from these studies have informed a diversity of outputs focussed on themes related to educational inequality, participation and also, identity work, with both practical and theoretical applications. This session will focus on the theoretical findings but will include links to further readings and resources, relevant to both practitioners and researchers.

By challenging dominant discourses around the themes of engagement, belonging and success, the intent of this presentation is to foreground alternative and perhaps, hidden, understandings of ‘being’ within the HE space. Such perspectives may or may not fit with meritocratic or assumed understandings of what academic belonging, engagement and success should look like including challenging how these ideals are currently measured within the sector. Instead, drawing upon students’ own perspectives conveyed through interviews, surveys and short narrative vlogs, we show how these taken for granted aspects of university student experience are complex sociological ideas, and how a troubling tension exists between sectoral desires to create effective ‘belonging’; ‘engagement’ and ‘success’ which elides the multiple, affective and material ways these are experienced by individual learners. Providing alternative perspectives provides a foundation for how we might rethink educational praxis to better reflect diversity challenging normative understandings of student identity and ‘being’.

The notion of power is key to these discussions: particularly in terms of who has the power to define who belongs, who is engaged and who is successful as well as how each of these (belonging, engagement and success) is conveyed. By foregrounding the disjunctures and discrepancies in assumed understandings, this presentation will provide a counter narrative to accepted forms of being in higher education, particularly important in the growing and global desire to ‘open up’ and widen participation in HE as a result of social, economic and political prerogatives.

The paper will outline the development of a transformative adult education project through the Football and War Network. The project brings together historians from the academic and football worlds so all the research centred around football, popular culture, war and history can link up in a transgressive manner (hooks, 1994). The project discusses and disseminates subjects such as: football clubs and their relationship with the armed forces; the social impact of football on the populace during times of war; the military and political implications of the role of footballers and football clubs during times of armed conflict; the economic, political and footballing role women played; and how authoritarian regimes such as those in Italy and Argentina, have used football as a propaganda tool internally and externally. With the aims of creating a counter-narrative and making an intervention into popular culture that challenges the link between football and the far-right (Blaschke, 2022) to promote anti-fascism, equality and challenge misogyny.

The Network has created a website and twitter account that act as free information and resource tools. It runs a free seminar series that have included running events in collaboration with football clubs such as Dulwich Hamlet and Exeter City. Thus, it brings a popular form of adult education to community groups and football fans from a new perspective, helping to create as Gramsci (1973:333) highlights a theoretical consciousness of a person’s practical activity and critical understanding of self, knowledge and understanding.

Notably, in terms of the impact it has through its public seminars and community-based activities. Particularly, in relation to dealing with issues such as how the Fascist regime in Italy and authoritarian regimes in countries such as Francoist Spain and Argentina in the 1970s, used football to embed and promote their political ideologies (Lee, 2022; Richards, 2022); and the development, banning and then rise of Women’s Football in Britain from the First World War to the current day, encompassing the Suffragette Movement, as well as the struggle for equality within the game (Dunn, 2022). To paraphrase hooks (1994:13) through these activities the project has the courage to transgress those boundaries that would have confined the public to a rote, assembly-line approach to their learning of the relationship between football and war.

According to social sciences, education is a process of primary and secondary socialisation that consists of learning and reproducing patterns of thought and rules of behaviour from social groups and contexts.As well as, education is considered as a process that enables each person to emancipate, to find his unique and authentic self, generating new meaning.

Such a process has also been called individuation (Jung, 1921). It consists of a perspective transformation and radical awareness, which occurs infrequently, as a result of a 'disorienting dilemma', triggered by a life crisis or major life transition (Mezirow, 1997).

In the context of transformative learning, the narrative structure of the hero's journey (Campbell, 1949; Pearson, 1991) can be proposed and renewed as a valuable adult education tool to guide such a personal transformation and individual empowerment from a condition of stillness and helplessness to one of change and hopefulness (Zimmermann, 2000). The twelve stages of the hero's journey (Vogler, 1992) trace the ten stages of Mezirow's perspective transformation to lead to the return, consisting of reintegration, of a complete individual personality, which manages to hold together both the One and the Other.

We live in age of permenent and unsolved crisis (Stevenson, 2024) on both an individual and social level. The multiple crises of post-modernity, associated with the perception of risk and uncertainty (Bauman, 2000), arise from the dilemma between freedom and security: if you gain one, you lose the other, and viceversa. However, the strong perception of insecurity stems from the inability to trust and accept the Other. In other words, the level of insecurity perceived depends on the level of denial of the Other: the more we deny the Other, the more insecure we feel. Anyway, there are different forms and degrees of denial of otherness, up to its expulsion (Han, 2017).

Thus, the perspective transformation should take place as the shift from denial to acceptance of the Other, that can be possible if people learn to turn inward, observing and reflecting on themselves. In order to overcome the stagnation of crisis and to feel both free and secure at the same time, firstly people must be educated to become aware of their deepest fears and emotional wounds. In this sense, education involves a culture of relational trauma (Schore, 2000) that explores its subcoscious origins, the attachment styles (Bowlby, 1989) and maladaptive patterns of thought and behaviour (Ellis, 2002) learned during the earliest years, and still subconsciously reproduced during adulthood.

Human beings are relational beings, not only capable of feeling, but also capable of making sense and producing meaning. Throughout storytelling in the form of the hero's journey it is possible to teach people to transgress and wholeheartledly become oneself. Indeed, the structure of the hero's journey, when applied to the interpretation of people’s personal stories, allows them to gain new awareness, to break the vicious circle of past trauma and to integrate their often rigid and absolute patterns of thought, holding the other part they have learnt to deny.

It has always been common to link education and social justice, with commentators from a diverse range of political perspectives claiming that learning is an engine for securing greater social justice. In such circumstances it is immediately apparent that very general assumptions about education, social justice and the relationship between the two factors are frequently made, but with little explication of detail. The danger is that rigorous intellectual analysis is replaced by bland exhortations.

This paper seeks to explore these issues in the context of professional learning and development, as a particular form of learning that is focused on supporting people prepare for, and engage in, work. Some of this activity, perhaps an increasing volume of it, may be characterised as having a social justice dimension, in particular PLD that is focused on issues relating to equalities and diversity (Forde and Torrance, 2021). However, such work also experiences many tensions and contradictions, not least because PLD is overwhelmingly supported and provided by employer organisations who see professional learning as a means to increase employee efficiency and effectiveness, on terms largely defined by the employer. Typically employees are not encouraged to challenge the overall aims of the employer, but only to consider how practices can be developed to meet these aims more effectively. Going further, it may be argued that in many cases the fundamental aim of PLD is to secure the support of employees for the employer’s goals and/or methods. This is evident in the many PLD programmes that organisations invest in when trying to facilitate organisational change.

In this paper I seek to argue that professional learning for social justice must adopt a much more critical stance in relation to work itself. For example, for those who work in educational institutions, it is important to understand how such work can both challenge and reproduce social injustice. However, and going further, such work is itself embedded in social relations that are socially unjust – based on the exploitation of education workers’ labour, and most obviously the labour of women, Black and disabled workers (also those most likely to be employed on short-term precarious contracts).

Critical professional development (Parkhouse et al, 2023), that explicitly works for social justice, must extend beyond learning for work, or even about work but must also engage in learning against work as it seeks to disrupt practices that embed and extend inequalities and social injustice. In making the case for an explicitly ‘Critical’ PLD this paper will consider the need to go beyond Mezirow’s (1997) conception of transformative adult education, with its focus on transformation of the self, and consider whether it is possible to think of professional learning that reshapes social relations. It locates the approach within a Gramscian ‘war of position’ (1971) that recognises the need for on-going ideological struggle, and the central role of educators in this process (Mayo 2005). Failure to take this struggle seriously leaves important terrain uncontested, and the common sense of neoliberal social injustice at work unchallenged.

In 1994, bell hooks wrote about the crisis in education, asserting that "students often do not want to learn and teachers do not want to teach" (p. 12), highlighting the urgent need for transformation within the educational system. She introduced the concept of "engaged pedagogy," emphasizing collaboration between teachers and students in a learning environment that promotes critical thinking, dialogue, and active participation. This approach challenges traditional power dynamics in the classroom, fostering a democratic exchange of ideas where all voices are valued (Freire, 2002). In today's challenging times, marked by rising conflicts and extremist ideologies, promoting education as a practice of freedom becomes increasingly crucial.

This study aims to present initial findings from research on classroom discussion transcripts produced during a teacher training course conducted in 2021/22. Sixteen teachers from primary school and lower secondary schools participated in both in-person and online meetings to learn how to conduct dialogic inquiry (Wells, 1999) in their classrooms.

Throughout the training course, teachers were encouraged to share their experiences and transcribe dialogues, receiving personalized feedback from trainers and researchers following a collaborative analysis process. In line with the need for pedagogical transformation, this study seeks to examine how the training influenced teachers' behaviors in classroom discussion. The goal is to provide participants with a situated understanding of the learning processes that characterized the training experience, with the aim of equipping them with tools for professional reflection (Schön, 1993).

The on-going analysis process follows the Qualitative content analysis method (Kuckartz, 2013; Mayring, 2020) and using the software QCAmap. Preliminary results will be presented.