Agentic belonging: how can universities enhance student outcomes by helping students to better understand their own belonging needs and take action?

Students’ sense of belonging at university has been robustly connected to various positive outcomes; including engagement with studies, satisfaction, mental wellbeing and successful degree completion. Most existing literature quite rightly challenges the “find your place” narrative that places the burden of belonging onto individual students, focusing instead on what institutions can do to provide support, opportunities and cultures that foster belonging.

However, belonging requires desire, motivation and action from the individual student. A focus solely on providing the right conditions for belonging risks undermining the role of the student. Workshop interventions with students to talk about belonging and re-establish student agency have begun to be explored in the US context, but have not been tested in other higher education systems.

This thesis addresses this gap by developing and evaluating a workshop intervention to help develop student agency in building belonging. The ‘agentic belonging’ workshop was delivered as part of a quasi-experimental research approach with 101 participants from two English universities in the 2022/23 academic year.
A longitudinal and mixed-methods approach was developed around a Theory of Change model to assess the impact the workshop had on attendees compared to two control groups: one who attended a study skills workshop, and one that did not attend either workshop.

Results show that the agentic belonging workshop’s learning outcomes were mostly met when compared to control groups. Whilst attendees reported different approaches to how they then took action to build belonging, changes in self-reported measures of belonging were not significantly different across the workshop groups. However, belonging workshop attendees had significantly higher continuation rates compared to both control groups.

This thesis provides recommendations for practice around running and enhancing such agentic belonging workshops in other contexts as well as how more student-centric approaches to building belonging can be embedded within personal tutoring, learner analytics and other institutional support programmes.