Belonging in the Law Classroom: Preliminary Reflections from a South Australian Case Study

What the paper says

This article reports the findings of the Belonging in the Law Classroom Project (Belonging Project) – a qualitative research project undertaken during 2022 with the support of an UniSA Early Career Researcher Teaching and Learning Grant. The Belonging Project aims to improve the experience and retention of first-year Law students by better understanding and fostering their sense of belonging in the online or physical classroom. The idea that students can and need to belong to a higher education community has become engrained within higher education policy and practice. Past studies have identified a strong causal link between students’ sense of belonging at University and student retention. This has led to a sustained focus on developing institutional strategies to improve student engagement, largely focused on extra-curricular supports or activities, but less focus on what happens in the classroom to foster student belonging. By focusing on student belonging in the classroom, and enacting dialogic approaches to provide students with opportunities to talk and explore within the classroom setting, as well as connecting with their life worlds and funds of knowledge to help students identify the existing skills and resources that they bring to the law studies, the Belonging Project provides a fresh perspective for teaching staff to understand student retention and engagement This article will explore some of the practical frameworks, exemplars and resources complied during the Belonging Project to provide first year law teachers with building blocks that they can utilise to foster student belonging in their classroom.