Jennie Blake: making space for belonging

As an American transplanted as a young adult to the UK, Jennie Blake knows a lot about what it means to belong somewhere. For her, belonging is an action: it is about having the agency to make choices, and for that to be realised, belonging cannot be something that we do for students; it must be enabled in all of our systems, structures and processes, so that we can recognise it by its presence and not just – as is all too often the case – its absence. And belonging, true ‘belongingness’, is unconditional. We must be prepared to embrace our own vulnerability and question to what extent we are willing to cede space and agency to our students. This can be as simple as building an interactive ‘magic to-do list’ into a pre-arrival resource, as Jennie’s team did, and assuming that students may not want to start university worrying about what they don’t know yet. Of course they don’t know anything yet! But we can embrace and value the conversation with them, and learn from them as much as they do from us. The resources we mentioned15% solutions: an introductory overviewbrown, a.m. (2017) Emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. AK PressFawns, T. An entangled pedagogy: Looking beyond the pedagogy-technology dichotomy. Postdigital Science and Education 4, 711–728 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00302-7 Hypothesis annotation tool: https://web.hypothes.is/ Life at University: The University of Manchester guide for new students.And the article we talked aboutBlake, J. and Pearson, L. (2025) ‘The power of an open door: student partnership and supportive transition to higher education’, Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/13603108.2025.2474558