Reflecting on the work of Liz Bunting and Vikki Hill
I find myself relating to Bunting & Hill’s (2021) idea of ‘Belonging’ as a social and relational construct rooted in human connection.
At the onset of this project, I am investigating the idea of community. I’m particularly interested in what constitutes community from a student perspective and how pedagogic practices can help facilitate its formation.
To reflect a little on my own positionality, I grew up in New Delhi, India; from an early age my sense of community has always been rooted in an urban-Indian context, where we were largely shielded from the class struggles in the outside world and my immediate community was constructed of people of a similar socio-economic background to my parents. Moving to Hong Kong at the age of 18 challenged me on multiple levels as I was forced to adapt to a new culture and environment. I am someone who has spent majority of their professional career (and adult life) moving through through a variety of social, cultural and academic contexts. Between 2012 and 2024, barring a couple years in between I’ve been part of three academic institutions namely, The University of Hong Kong, University College London and University of the Arts London. My role at these institutions has ranged from undergraduate to postgraduate student, research assistant and lecturer. This has allowed me to understand the value of community from the perspective of student experience but further as a core, emotional need for belonging.
When I first moved to Hong Kong, I felt very isolated from my family and friends back home in India. Very few people spoke English as a first language and I struggled to make a friend, let alone break into friendship groups. Strangely, my most happy memories are ones from studio and in-class activities; particularly ones where I felt engaged with the task I was doing and the people I was doing them with including our tutors and lecturers at the time. It’s interesting to hear Bunting & Hill (2021) talk about the social and relational aspects of belonging, stressing on the importance of (loving) dialogue and its capacity to engender a liberating humanisation (Schroder, 2010 as cited in Bunting & Hill, 2021). In a way, it brings it full circle for me, seeing myself as a lecturer now and understanding how my interaction with students can de-centre the traditional power dynamics at play in a more banking education model (Freire, 2020).
Where does social justice come into all of this?
This is the something I’m grappling with at the moment. The lessons I learned from my Inclusive Practices Unit is that it isn’t just enough to talk about social justice. But rather embody it in the way we engage with our students and help scaffold their learning and personal journeys. While I do think the former is still important, the latter is much more difficult to articulate.
Increasingly, I am thinking social justice is in the little things. It has to simple. It has to be small and granular. The more I try to complicate it, the more it slips away from me.
In thinking about belonging and community, the little things can be moments and/or experiences, factors or influences, workshops or classroom activities that enable students to connect with each other, deepening their bonds with each other and with us. The decentering of authority and multiplicity of voices can be challenge dominant narratives and create the space for small social justice transformations (Tate, 2019 as cited in Bunting & Hill, 2021).
If at the end of this I can look back at my project as a series of experiments (successful and failed) that contribute as a toolkit/means for reflecting on what it means to create belonging in a HE context, I will be happy.
Embedding play and flattening power dynamics
Bunting and Hill (2021) talk about this idea of embedding play as a means toward flattening power dynamics; co-creating artefacts as a tool for breaking down hierarchies with students. I would like to take this provocation as a seed for my intervention/s. It’s both an ethos and way of working that I’ve always felt fascinated by. As an educator in Arts and Design, I think its perhaps more challenging (anyway) to have to adopt the banking model (Freire) as the extent to which knowledge exists and is produced daily is already de-centred to an extent. I know we might know always see it but in dialogue (Bunting & Hill, 2021) with my students, I learn as much from them as they do from me . As such its perhaps more prudent to see myself as a facilitator of their learning journeys as opposed to the orchestrator.
References
- Bunting, L., & Hill, V. (2021). Relational Reflections: How do we nurture belonging in creative Higher Education?. Innovative Practice in Higher Education.
- Freire, P. (2020). Pedagogy of the oppressed. In Toward a sociology of education (pp. 374-386). Routledge.
- Schoder, E. M. (2010). Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of love. Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, School of Graduate Studies.
- Tate, S. (2019). Tackling the ‘BPOC’ Attainment Gap in UK Universities [online]. TEDx Royal Central School. [Viewed 29 May 2021]. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPMuuJrfawQ