Making mature undergraduates’ experience visible:exploring sense of belonging and use of digital technologies

The aim of this paper is to explore the role that informal networks, interactions and digital technologies play in supporting the participation in undergraduate education of eleven mature students coming from widening participation backgrounds in one research-intensive United Kingdom (UK) university. For eighteen months mature students were co-researchers of the longitudinal qualitative study DD-LAB: Digital Diversity Learning and Belonging'. Along with problematizing the heterogeneity of students grouped under the category and home location were as influential as age when understanding their participation in university. Digital technologies played a role in fostering belonging and participation in academic and social spaces. Yet, engagement in a digital world did not necessarily mitigate their positioning as a minority group within a research-intensive institution. Although digital technologies and informal networks helped mature students overcome institutional struggles and expanded modes of belonging, we conclude that the institutional and social positioning constrained mature students sense of academic and social integration, leading to continuing inequalities that universities need to address

Under-represented students’ university trajectories:building alternative identities and forms of capital through digital improvisations

This paper focuses on widening participation in relation to under-represented student negotiations of and trajectories through university by drawing attention to students’ informal digital practices for studying and social interactions associated with undergraduate student life. Drawing on a two-year UK study and Holland et al.’s [1998. Identity and Agency in Cultural Worlds. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press ] framing of agency, culture and identity making across ‘figured worlds’, we consider the importance of informal studying and socio-academic practices and the role of digital technologies in fostering agency and identity making. The significance of this study lies in revealing the particular importance of improvisation and collective agency for under-represented students participating in university. Whilst acknowledging that the technologies can also reproduce social inequalities, we conclude that, through the increasing interconnectedness of academic and social interactions, the digital improvisations offer creative opportunities for students to negotiate spatial, social and academic inequalities and lead to new/alternative identities and develop stronger social, cultural and educational capital

Writing on the wall:How the use of technology can open dialogical spaces in lectures

This article discusses experiences using an online collaborative whiteboard to provide dialogical spaces (Wegerif, 2013) for students to reflect on their understanding of concepts in lectures in two higher-education courses: one in psychology and the other in teacher education. When describing dialogical spaces, the following terms are crucial: opening (how the dialogical space is enabled), widening (how many different voices and perspectives it allows for) and deepening (the extent of critical reflections that it provides). The research question is: ‘What kind of affordances are there in using a collaborative whiteboard to support the dimensions of opening, widening and deepening dialogical spaces in lectures?’ Audio recordings of peer discussions, material produced in lectures, focus-group interviews with students and course evaluations from teachers are used to examine the activities through the analytical lenses of opening, widening and deepening dialogical spaces. The focus is on how creative knowledge processes are stimulated through dialogue. Based on the two cases, we argue that opening dialogical spaces provides students with rich possibilities to reflect on concepts and develop arguments, thereby providing feedback on students’ understanding of course content. Students bring a range of perspectives and experiences to the scene, thereby widening such spaces. For lecturers, the critical point was to deepen the spaces and orchestrate a dialogue with students. We found the concept of a dialogical space to be fruitful for planning and assessing discussion-based activities in the context of the lecture format.publishedVersio