The place of academic libraries in nurturing a sense of student belonging

A colleague in our university library team has recently instigated a journal club, an opportunity for the staff to explore a piece of writing which has an impact on our work and discuss it together, potentially generating ideas for future developments. I thought this was a wonderful idea and the only downside to our first session was that I'd made so many notes on the reading that I didn't get time to discuss them all during our hour-long meeting. As such I thought I'd use my notes and expand them into a post on here (my first in over a year!).

The article discussed in this first meeting was from WonkHE and saw Anna Jackson, Gail Capper and Sunday Blake offering a summary of the report they'd put together discussing their research into student belonging, The four foundations of belonging at university.

The article and report listed four foundational areas of student belonging:

• Connection
• Inclusion
• Support
• Autonomy

I thought I'd explore each of these and offer some thoughts and ideas for what they could mean for academic libraries.

Connection

Part of the discussion in this section was around the need for communal spaces where students can mix and connect with those on their course, primarily during scheduled contact hours but also beyond the classroom. This is where the Library can be so crucial in this regard. In the two HE libraries that I've worked in over the last 5 years I've seen an increasing demand for group study spaces where students can work collaboratively and in providing this we're able to help foster that sense of belonging, providing an arena in which students can continue the discussions they have begun in class. Something my current library has also done which I think helps in this regard, is to organise the print collections not by strict Dewey but by subject groupings. Each floor is in Dewey order but in such a way that students on a particular course should find the majority of their resources in a single location. This means that students coming in to research are more likely to meet others on their course in the same space.

More generally, I've long believed in the Library as a central hub that is welcoming and safe to individuals. Sometimes students need a space to themselves and the Library provides somewhere to do that without feeling conscious of one's lone status, thus fostering a different sense of belonging. I've written previously about how important my college library was to me when I first started there, not knowing anyone else. Sitting in the cafes or cross-college communal spaces I felt incredibly conscious of being a lone soul, but in the Library no-one gave a second look to someone sat quietly reading the latest issue of Empire magazine. As I started to make connections through my courses, I'd invite them into my safe space in the Library to continue developing the relationships that formed in class (much to the chagrin of the college librarians no doubt).

Inclusion

A really interesting point to come out of this article was that student responses to the survey on which it was based indicated that the drive for more inclusive content on their modules was less about "seeing themselves represented" and more in relation to academic rigour. If content included diverse voices it showed that academics were not just churning out the same discussion pieces year after year but were exploring the latest thought and research. This really chimed with the efforts libraries and librarians have been making in recent years around diversifying reading lists, that including marginalised voices amongst the mandatory and further reading, linked to library resources, would reflect well upon the academics compiling them and further foster student belonging (and no doubt be something that will filter through as positives within NSS responses).

As a subject liaison librarian I need to make sure that I'm equipping academic colleagues with the skills and knowledge to be able to identify these voices within our collections and help them find easy ways of keeping up to date with the latest research outputs from across the spectrum of authors.

Support

Key to student belonging in relation to support was the idea that its essential for that support to be available at the point of need. Students complained about how often they were sent in bureaucratic circles in trying to access services in relation to things like additional needs and mental health. So often the Library is at the heart of the university campus and as discussed above, is a welcoming and safe space for all kinds of students. So whilst we may not be the place to directly offer support in relation to these issues, we need to have the information readily available of how they access it and clear steps through which to guide them in their next moves. Training in supporting a diverse range of needs of our students is ever more essential for frontline library staff, and that the importance of these roles is recognised by university management to deliver a cohesive approach across a multitude of services.

Also mentioned in relation to the place of support in creating belonging is the need to introduce and grow the key academic skills of our students throughout their university journey. This should be integrated into courses as standard and the library's information literacy programme should be part of this. My experience of working as a librarian delivering such sessions so far has seen two approaches. Either the module leaders invite you into sessions, usually at the start of the first year, and you're asked to deliver all that their students will need to know in relation to research and referencing in a single 1 hour session (or if you're lucky this will be split into two sessions over the initial weeks of semester 1), OR the library team create and offer sessions that are open to students across courses which are voluntary to attend. The latter of these gives us more control in what the content is and how we deliver it but we'll never reach everyone who needs this support in this way. The pandemic has seen a proliferation in the creation of video content that can supplement both of these approaches but as we've come out the other side of lockdowns, to me, its been ever more evident how much more students get out of live face-to-face sessions. As such, an integrated programme of skills sessions, perhaps combining the knowledge of library, careers, academic support and other similar services, taught across the academic year and advanced throughout the levels of their degree programme, would seem like the ideal approach to me - I'll keep bringing it up in the hope that someday university management will afford us the time and facilities to do this.

Autonomy

This aspect of the report was about giving students the tools and support to improve themselves and have a voice within course content. For example it recommended that assignment feedback should seek to find positives on which students can develop ahead of their next assessment. From a Library perspective, part of this could be encouraging academics to point students towards relevant support as part of that feedback. One department I previously worked with had a feedback table with options that the marker could select to suggest next steps for the student. One of these options was to book an appointment with their subject librarian to improve their research skills or referencing. Something like this being adopted across courses could definitely help foster a sense of belonging and demonstrate the interconnections between different departments and services.

Another thing mentioned in relation to autonomy was involving students in the co-creation of course content and so I wondered if this is something we could adopt for information skill sessions. Perhaps after an initial introductory session in semester 1 of their first year, students could be involved in deciding what content and support they would like librarians to deliver in further sessions as they move through their academic journey. Partly there's the aspect of students not knowing what they need to know until you tell them, so this would need to be a collaborative process but it would be great to have the opportunity to sit down with cohort representatives and find out what they need.

So there you have my thoughts on this article and report and what it could mean for academic libraries. Have a read yourself and let me know what other outcomes you could foresee, or share ideas and practice you have developed in your own institutions that could help better foster a sense of student belonging.