Beyond belonging: connecting across the STEMM + B student life course

Within the context of increasing widening participation and student experience agendas across UK higher education (HE), we conducted a five-year longitudinal study (2019–2024) at a UK university with a specialist ‘STEMM + B’ (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, medicine, and business) focus. This paper presents data from 117 interviews with 48 students at this institution to explore the dynamic and changing nature of belonging over the student life course. Findings from these interviews indicate that a sense of belonging is important to students and their university experience, but that the traditional notion of institutional or disciplinary belonging may sometimes be problematic. Interview data suggests that belonging may be better served by supporting students to have agency and opportunity in connecting on their own terms, which may also enable the institution to better harness the potential for innovation and change that a diverse population of students brings. This paper challenges the traditional notion of belonging as a stable, uniform construct, and proposes a critical conception of ‘connecting’ as a more dynamic lens to better understand the complexity of students’ sense of belonging and how it evolves throughout the student life course. While the traditional notion of ‘belonging’ may risk unintentionally restricting what and how students belong, the agency involved in ‘connecting’ is more inclusive, flexible, and potentially more aligned to the dynamic nature of disciplines and student identities. The notion of ‘connecting’ attempts to capture the idea that belonging in HE may be more meaningful if it is conceptualized as less stable or imposed.