Teaching in Higher Education

ISSN: 1356-2517 (Print) 1470-1294 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cthe20

Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment,

belonging and identity for Indigenous students in
Australian universities

Jennifer Carter, David Hollinsworth, Maria Raciti & Kathryn Gilbey

To cite this article: Jennifer Carter, David Hollinsworth, Maria Raciti & Kathryn Gilbey
(2018) Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment, belonging and identity for Indigenous
students in Australian universities, Teaching in Higher Education, 23:2, 243-260, DOI:
10.1080/13562517.2017.1379485

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1379485

Published online: 22 Sep 2017.

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TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION, 2018
VOL. 23, NO. 2, 243–260
https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1379485

Academic ‘place-making’: fostering attachment, belonging

and identity for Indigenous students in Australian universities
Jennifer Cartera, David Hollinswortha, Maria Racitia and Kathryn Gilbeyb
a
School of Business, Faculty of Arts, Business and Law, University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore,
Australia; bCollege of Indigenous Studies, Education and Research, University of Southern Queensland,
Toowoomba, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Place is a concept used to explore how people ascribe meaning to Received 20 December 2016
their physical and social surrounds, and their emotional affects. Accepted 21 August 2017
Exploring the university as a place can highlight social relations
KEYWORDS
affecting Australian Indigenous students’ sense of belonging and Indigenous higher education
identity. We asked what university factors contribute to the students; academics; place
development of a positive sense of place for these students. attachment; belonging;
Findings are presented from two Australian universities, based on identity
focus groups with Indigenous students, and interviews with
Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff. Students prioritized
relationships with academics as a key theme, stressing academic’s
flexibility and understanding enabled their persistence at
university. Students situationally manage self-identification,
requiring academics to engage effectively with diverse students,
but staff felt they required further professional development. We
argue that academics can ‘make’ university places in their
pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to
recognize this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued
element of their work.

Introduction: placing the university

Many factors impact on students’ decisions to apply for university, choose and change
programmes of study, defer or withdraw from study, and on their capacity to complete
and graduate. One significant factor is the university as a place, or perhaps, the student’s
development of a sense of place. Place comprises the activities, and the cognitive and
emotional values related to meanings human beings draw from and associate with a
locale and objects therein (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977). While easily overlooked in daily
life (Malpas 1999) and highly subjective, the concept of place has become a ‘prominent
focus’ for investigating the relationship between people and their environments (Patterson
and Williams 2005, 361). Over time, people can develop strong attachments to place and
form identities based on these attachments, bonding with the biophysical features and/or
the social relationships within a geographic area (Knez 2005). Spaces thus become places

CONTACT Jennifer Carter jcarter@usc.edu.au School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Business and Law,
University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore DC, QLD, 4558, Australia
Dedicated to the late Dr Michael Gardiner who was part of our team.
© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
244 J. CARTER ET AL.

as they acquire definition and meaning (Stedman 2003, 823). Relph (1976, 10) connects
space, landscape and place, describing them as ‘poles of the geographical life-world –
space as experienced, landscape as the bounding surface of space, and place as centres
of meaning in space and landscape’.
The university campus can offer staff and students a sense of belonging that may assist
in their studies and support their persistence with the many academic and non-academic
forces that threaten progression and success (Cox, Herrick, and Keating 2012). Such a
sense of belonging may be thought of through the concepts of place-attachment and
place-identity. Place-attachment refers to the social interactions and relationships
created and developed over time, and the emotional, cognitive and behavioural bonds
developed; whereas place-identity refers to the subjective concept of oneself as defined
by those social elements and biophysical attributes which are co-constructed through
the lived experience of place (Knez 2005). ‘Going to uni’ can become an integral part of
one’s identity and the associated emotional and social responses contribute to attendance
and participation, as well as reducing alienation that may encourage attrition (Holton
2015).
Acquiring this sense of place attachment is hard for many students. It can be especially
challenging for Australian Indigenous students who are more likely than their non-
Indigenous peers to be first in their family to attend university (James et al. 2008; Behrendt
et al. 2012). Asmar, Page, and Radloff (2011) found that only 58% of Indigenous students
were enrolled in full-time, on-campus mode, compared with 74% of non-Indigenous dom-
estic students. Challenges facing the small number of Indigenous postgraduate candidates
also highlight their sense of isolation, lacking peer-support from other Indigenous post-
graduates (Barney 2013). For some Indigenous students, the Indigenous Student
Support Centres provide both a specific physical place within the broader campus land-
scape as well as a venue for Indigenous peer support (Andersen, Bunda, and Walter
2008; Howlett et al. 2008; Oliver et al. 2013; Pechenkina 2015; Barney 2016). This
paper explores what university factors contribute to the development of a positive sense
of place for Indigenous students at two Australian universities. We found that academic
staff make the critical difference to fostering a sense of place attachment, identity and
belonging for the students in our study.

Campus racial climate, student diversity, and support from teaching staff
Mass higher education has meant that universities enrol increasingly diverse students in
terms of ability, age, ethnicity, educational background and class. This diversification
has challenged universities’ capacity to engage effectively with all students and reduce edu-
cational inequalities among historically underrepresented groups (Kuh 2009; Kahn 2014;
Quaye and Harper 2015). American studies of non-white and linguistically diverse univer-
sity students point to additional challenges for integration and a sense of belonging that
impact retention and academic success (Hurtado and Carter 1997; Tierney 1999;
Hurtado and Ponjuan 2005; Edman and Brazil 2009). Wei, Ku, and Liao (2011) and
others term this additional factor minority stress. Such studies depart from the original
focus of retention studies on the student’s feelings and attitudes to include the institution’s
contribution to the generally weaker sense of belonging found among students of color
(Harper and Hurtado 2007; Johnson et al. 2007; Yosso et al. 2009). In particular, scholars
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 245

characterize the campus racial climate as critical to retention and success (Griffin, Muniz,
and Espinosa 2012; Johnson et al. 2014). Key aspects of the climate include the degree and
tone of interracial interactions and encouragement by teaching staff. Positive peer inter-
actions across racial lines promoted academic self-confidence, social agency and likelihood
to think critically, as did enrolment in one or more diversity courses (Laird 2005).
Media reports concentrate on spectacular incidents of racial antagonism and evaluate
management responses, but as Yosso et al. (2009) observe, the much more ubiquitous and
mundane experience of a negative campus climate for students of color are microaggres-
sions from fellow students and teaching staff. The existence of historically Black colleges
and the preeminence of residential accommodation in universities in the USA are particu-
lar factors that make the campus racial climate model more difficult to apply in Australia
(Rodgers and Summers 2008). Of note to our research is the role of microaggressions, and
the mediating impact of positive interactions with academics and peers, and fundamen-
tally the role of the institution as an inclusive and respectful (or not) place, rather than
individual student background characteristics, in fostering a sense of place and belonging.
Umbach and Wawrzynski (2005) found that teaching staff who regularly use active and
collaborative learning techniques encourage students to be more engaged in their learning
activities, regardless of their academic aptitude. Their results reinforce the key role of aca-
demics in creating a sense of student belonging especially in those who lack dominant cul-
tural capital (Tierney 1999). McKay and Devlin (2014) argue that demystifying academic
culture and discourses for students from low socioeconomic backgrounds is critical to
their success. Tapp (2014) found that collaborative, participatory pedagogy supported
student creation of academic identities that reduce alienation and promote a sense of
place and belonging. Masika and Jones (2016) caution that while collaborative pedagogies
enhanced students’ sense of belonging and learner identities, tensions and challenges
remained for diverse student communities.
Specific characteristics that enhance a sense of place and belonging include teaching
staff encouraging student participation and interaction that offer opportunities to
develop students’ identities as learners. Freeman, Anderman, and Jensen (2007) found
that interaction with teaching staff was critical for all students’ motivation and sense of
belonging, specifically a ‘pedagogical caring’ rather than generic interpersonal caring.
Esteban Bara (2014, 754) urges teachers ‘belligerently’ shape their students’ moral identity
by ‘conveying the best as well as seeking the very best for each and every student.’ Other
studies with students of color (Rodgers and Summers 2008; Wei, Ku, and Liao 2011) argue
that such pedagogical caring may be especially important in maintaining motivation and a
sense of academic achievement for minority students. Gale and Tranter (2011) argue for a
‘recognitive justice’ as a relational sense of social justice and equity in Australian higher
education.
Richardson and Radloff (2014) capture the fundamental staff-student relationship as
‘allies in learning’. They stress that much research on learning focuses on curricula
rather than the influence of good teaching and support to increase student engagement
and satisfaction and reduce attrition. A 2011 AUSSE paper (Uniting teachers and learners)
found that 75% of students who rated their relationships with teaching staff as poor were
considering withdrawal, compared to only 19% of those who rated their relationships as
excellent. The same paper reported that, amidst government and management moves to
intensify quality standards and performance targets, and monitoring regimes in higher
246 J. CARTER ET AL.

education, student perspectives on good teaching and a focus of those aspects that opti-
mize quality learning were ‘almost entirely absent’ (Anon 2011, 1). The relentless
moves towards neoliberalist measurement of teacher performativity and reducing individ-
ual academic autonomy in the design and delivery of teaching poses an existential threat to
the capacity of teachers to form and sustain the quality of staff-student relationships
characterized as pedagogical caring (Davies 2005; Davies and Bansel 2007; Sleeter 2008;
Berg, Huijbens, and Larsen 2016; Orr and Orr 2016). These social relationships are part
of, and co-constitute, the experience of the university and the classroom as places in
which belonging is fostered and specific academic identities are co-created.
Salisbury (2014) highlights the often-unnoted emotional labour expected and needed
by students, especially those with disabilities or from underrepresented populations. She
stresses the time, effort and stress such labour demands when academics are juggling man-
agerialist concerns for higher productivity, more administration and auditing tasks and
more research. Teaching staff often understand the demand for pastoral support within
an ethic of care but are increasingly pressed, especially in the context of mass participation
in higher education (Holmwood and Bhambra 2012; Wilkins 2012), reducing their time
for creating the social relationships that can create place-attachment in under-represented
groups.
McAllister et al. (2014) note the significant and rising incidence of mental health chal-
lenges among Australian university students, especially depression and anxiety. Teaching
staff are frequently called upon to support such students, primarily at their request and
often linked to incapacity to meet workload requirements. Non-disclosure of the mental
health aspects was a primary barrier in their research, particularly for distance or
online students. Most teaching staff have little training in such areas and felt both accoun-
table and unable to provide necessary help. A key factor was little or no formal acknowl-
edgement of these pastoral care demands:
As a result staff spent a lot of time and energy working with students outside of their regular
professional contact, though this work was not included in job descriptions, and was not fac-
tored into workloads (McAllister et al. 2014, 196).

Laws and Fiedler (2012) reinforce the lack of workload recognition and general under-pre-
paredness of academic staff dealing with students who exhibited behavioural problems
and sought emotional support. They found that staff were increasingly wary of engaging
in such ‘emotional work’ and were largely unsupported by their institutions. While the
challenge of supporting students with mental health issues dominates literature on pas-
toral care, the key point of a hidden and unaccounted-for workload responsibility
extends to broader demands for mentoring and supporting all students with diverse
needs, including lack of fit with dominant university expectations. Shevalier and McKenzie
(2012, 1087) add that that ‘teachers who combine culturally responsive teaching practices
with caring, ethics-based approaches’ are much more effective in engaging racially and lin-
guistically diverse urban students. They distinguish between ‘caring about’ and ‘caring for’
students and focus on teaching teachers why such emotional work is needed, not just how
or what to teach. The increasing need for pedagogies of caring and collaboration, the lack
of training in staff to be competent across all student groups and the lack of workload rec-
ognition point to critical areas for research on attachments to place that can be constructed
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 247

both in classroom spaces and the wider university place, and their contribution to building
an identity as student.

Indigenous students in Australian higher education

Participation in higher education in Australia has grown from an elite few, to a mass
market, towards an almost universal expectation both in terms of numbers and of ‘life-
long learning’ (Gale and Tranter 2011). Within this expansion, retention rates and com-
pletion of degrees remain fairly static (Gale and Parker 2013). Despite policy objectives,
the completion rates for low socio-economic-status (SES) students and Indigenous stu-
dents continue to lag (Pechenkina, Kowal, and Paradies 2011; Devlin 2013; Naylor,
Baik, and James 2013). While around 3% of university students should be Indigenous
based on population and age figures, in 2013 the national enrolment figure was 1.0%
(Wilks and Wilson 2015, 20). Furthermore, the Indigenous attrition rate was around
33% compared to 20% for all domestic students, while the Indigenous completion rate
was 22% less than for non-Indigenous students (Wilks and Wilson 2015, 20). In 2016, fol-
lowing the national Behrendt Review 2012, Pechenkina (2015) found the Indigenous
student participation rate is still 1% while the Indigenous completion rate has fallen
from 32.4% to 28% (compared with 59% for non-Indigenous students). An early study
of why Indigenous students withdrew listed ‘non-academic’ factors such as finances,
family responsibilities and poor health; while more support from teaching staff was
seen as mitigating withdrawal (Ellender et al. 2008). Elite universities with low Indigenous
student enrolments have much better completion rates than those universities with large
numbers of Indigenous students, many using special entry pathways (Pechenkina 2015).
Given the persistence of significantly worse retention rates for Indigenous students,
there has been more attention to the barriers to participation than to studies of what
enables success (but see DiGregorio, Farrington, and Page 2000; Curtis, Townsend, and
Airini 2012; Martin et al. 2015; Barney 2016; Milne, Creedy, and West 2016; West et al.
2016). Key factors include the students’ place-based identity as learner, as belonging to
a university that welcomes and respects them as individuals and culturally, and the
balance of their relations with teaching staff that fosters their sense of place attachment.
Perhaps counter-intuitively some studies have found that Indigenous students’ expec-
tations and experiences are more optimistic or positive than those of their non-Indigenous
peers. In the 2009 Australasian Study of Student Engagement (AUSSE) surveying 526
Indigenous students, Asmar, Page, and Radloff (2011) found Indigenous students are sig-
nificantly more likely to report having discussed grades with teaching staff ‘often’ or ‘very
often’ (33%, compared with 22% in the non-Indigenous students matched sample). Indi-
genous students reported working with academics on non-coursework activities (11%,
compared with 6%); and having discussed ideas with teaching staff (15%, compared
with 11%). Their study found that later-year Indigenous students were more likely to
report positively on their study-related interactions with teaching staff (29%, compared
with 25% of domestic non-Indigenous peers).
These significantly favourable findings were reinforced in open-ended questions in that
research, where Indigenous students addressed ‘what was the best aspects of how your uni-
versity engages students in learning?’ and ‘what could be done to improve how your uni-
versity engages students?’ These questions are central to this research, making Asmar,
248 J. CARTER ET AL.

Page and Radloff’s analysis of particular interest. Indigenous students in their study were
especially appreciative of high quality lectures and well-run tutorials, efficient use of tech-
nology and prompt responses from academics to their inquiries. Other Indigenous student
responses asked for more engaging lectures, improvements in the speed and details of
feedback on their assignments and reductions in student workload. Asmar, Page and
Radloff highlighted that less than 10% of these comments were specific to Indigenous
matters: for example, commending staff who were ‘culturally competent’ or demanding
more Indigenous curriculum content. These results echo Day and Nolde (2009) who
found their sample of urban, special entry Indigenous students were largely similar in
their learning needs and responses to other first year students apart from their cultural
identity and ‘non-traditional’ pathway into university. Such results tend to contradict
those who assert specific Indigenous learning styles or fundamental cultural dissonance,
suggesting a more intercultural or hybrid model of classroom activities (Day et al. 2015;
Martin et al. 2015). Certainly, the broad range of backgrounds, experiences and responses
reported by Indigenous university students requires recognition of that diversity and repu-
diation of simple explanations of higher attrition rates (Oliver et al. 2015) and broader
analysis of social relations and aspects of the entire university place that contribute to
student belonging and identity.

Methodology
This study is a qualitative inquiry into such challenges, and the experiences, anxieties and
hopes of Indigenous students, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous teaching staff, in two
universities. We conducted three focus groups with Indigenous undergraduate students,
and interviews with two Indigenous higher degree by research (HDR) candidates, and
four Indigenous and eight non-Indigenous staff, of whom 8 are academic and 4 are
APT. The focus groups were facilitated by the first, second and fourth authors, and the
second and fourth authors conducted the interviews. Students were asked about their
experiences on campus, their social interactions with staff and students, the physical sur-
rounds, their sense of identity at university and attachment to the place, as well as how the
university could become a better place. Staff were asked about their interactions with stu-
dents, and the impact, if any, of their awareness that students were Indigenous, and what
the university does to value, acknowledge and respect Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islander peoples, and how the university could become a better place for Indigenous
students.
Recordings were professionally transcribed and then manually themed by the first and
second authors. While the sample size is small, the recordings averaged 50–75 min and
produced rich data. Quotes are de-identified and coded as [university code, F for under-
graduate focus group, P for HDR student, or A for academic, number of respondent at
each university: page of transcript]. Data was coded according to whether interviewees
mentioned identity, belonging, physical aspects of the place, staff, racism, support, peda-
gogy/curriculum, and recognition by the university of Indigenous culture and community.
Within that range of themes, it became apparent that relationships with academic staff
were arguably the fundamental component of whether students stayed at universities
and whether they felt a sense of belonging to the institution. This finding is significant
given that the literature in Australia overwhelmingly foregrounds Indigenous support
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 249

services and Indigenous peer-support, rather than attending to the role of academics. We
therefore present the key sub-themes we had grouped under the higher order theme of
‘staff’ to elaborate the role of academics in strengthening other themes such as building
sense of place, attachment, identity and belonging.

Findings and discussion

Undergraduate student experiences with teaching staff
Focus group responses frequently had a bipolar distribution, noting quite positive and
quite negative experiences from teaching staff affected their experiences at university. Stu-
dents cited exemplary staff support and validation, alongside examples of insensitive or
inflexible treatment which seriously jeopardized their sense of themselves as students
entitled to be at university. Positive examples include:
Female: It really boils down to the lecturers and the people that you have dealings with. I can
rattle off a half a dozen lecturers that really shouldn’t be here and there are others that will go
out of their way to make you feel confident and safe and secure, and you know what’s
expected and you know what you’re doing. That makes a huge difference. [CF1: 4]

Female: I think there are a lot of academics who genuinely respect and value alternative input to
the way that they see things, and are quite happy to be challenged to think differently, or to chal-
lenge us to think differently. But there are quite a few who are out there on the floor with no idea,
who are actually devaluing us and our experience through their attitudes. [CF2: 45–46]

Some focus group members were confident that across their programme of study, staff
were committed and respectful:
Female: I think in our program we’ve been really lucky to have teachers who are so passionate
about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues.

Female: Who respect our worldviews.

Female: Respect and don’t make assumptions or generalise things. I’ve found that I’ve only
butted heads with one or two teachers. But for the most part it’s been good. [CF2: 45]

Another student reported that she was in an assignment group who she ‘hated’ because she
was expected to do all the work, but she miscalculated the due date. When she became
aware of this, she broke down in class for another course and the tutor intervened to
grant an extension for his assignment so she could salvage the situation. She concluded:
‘That meant so much, so much, just that little bit of compassion and understanding. He
went, as far as I’m concerned, above and beyond’ [CF1: 17].
There were more instances provided where staff were unhelpful or even ‘deliberately
hurt you or deliberately set things up for people to fail’ than positive ones, perhaps indi-
cating their comparative impact [CF1: 6]. Students remembered being denied the oppor-
tunity for a re-mark [CF1: 17] or staff intolerance to questions:
When that happens instead of trying to explain it another way or being patient with me,
people become short [CF1: 26]

Some students reported examples of insensitivity or racism from fellow students or staff
but this was regarded as fairly rare, or as something they were used to and could
250 J. CARTER ET AL.

usually push back against. This finding is consistent with Jessop and Williams (2009) who
found English minority ethnic students reported racist incidents while downplaying their
significance. For some students, contesting non-Indigenous students’ opinions, and their
own academic success, was a form of defiance or resistance (cf. Pechenkina 2016).
Where teaching staff were regarded as allowing such hostility or even encouraging it
through unsafe pedagogy, students were more likely to protest vociferously. One often-
referred-to example was a role-play around Indigenous rights:
Female: … things like role-playing and setting assessments up that really put Aboriginal and
Torres Strait people in an awkward position. For example, in this role-play, [students] are
allowed to be racist, they’re allowed to be farmers, or Aborigines, or they’re allowed to be
a Pauline Hanson. They’re allowed to take on that role. There are Aboriginal people in
that class who have lived through that and get to hear that again while on campus. That’s
not safe to me.

Facilitator: So it’s about staff doing culturally unsafe things but also not creating a sense of
belonging and in fact the opposite for students?

Female: We come to university to educate ourselves, and when staff aren’t, they don’t have
that skill to navigate the room or even just set up assessments properly. That’s just a danger-
ous assessment in the first place. [CP2: 2–3]

Students from both universities referred to unanswered or delayed emails. For example,
one focus group reported:
Female: We have to wait a week, a week and a half for a response sometimes and that week,
week and a half can be a long time when you’re trying to finalise an assignment.

Male: Yeah I found the same thing too like sometimes when you need to talk to your lecturers
it could be a week later so even though you might have attempted it in class, during that week
and mention it again and you’re still going to an appointment to see [the lecturer] a week
later. [QF: 19]

This is especially significant for online students, but the 2011 AUSSE study found that only
7.8% of Australian teaching staff report the majority of students discuss ideas from classes
with them, compared with 29% of American teachers, and only 36.1% report students ask
questions in class compared with 48% (Anon 2011, 8–9). Some students expected high
standards of timely, effective and professional service, possibly reflecting the high costs
of university tuition and a shift to a ‘student-consumer’ identity (Tomlinson 2016). A
female student said:
In one of my courses I asked for feedback after the exam. I was told in an email that there
were too many students for that, didn’t have time. … Then just recently I emailed to ask
specific questions about a task and was emailed back, read the instructions. Even though I
dot-pointed the task question and then asked my question after, that was my response.
I’m paying $1000, over $1000, for this course; you have a duty to help. [CF1: 16]

Gloria and Robinson Kurpius (2001) emphazise ‘comfort in the university environment’
and mentoring as key supports for academic persistence of Native American undergradu-
ates by reducing stress and enhancing self-belief. For that study comfort emphasized the
racial climate and the role of academics in enabling Indigenous student success. Outside of
the classroom, teachers can contribute to the sense of belonging by practices that are
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 251

flexible and recognize student challenges. Our study echoes their findings, but highlights
the function of academic behaviours as generating a strong positive or weak negative sense
of ‘comfort’ within an overall process of developing a sense of identity, attachment and
belonging. Following Knez (2005), the university is more profoundly a place of social
relationships than a physical environment; and the emotional security and sense of
belonging that can be generated through positive relations with academic staff are pro-
foundly instrumental in enabling Indigenous students’ retention and academic success.

Higher degree student experiences

Only two of those interviewed were undertaking doctorates, making their input illustrative
rather than representative. Nevertheless, both candidates echoed other research to high-
light the intense lack of a peer group of Indigenous HDR students [CP: 17–18] (Barney
2013; Trudgett 2014). Feelings of isolation can be compounded by the lack of Indigenous
supervision. One stated:
I have three supervisors, all of them from three different universities, all of them are white
because there is nobody who’s senior enough in those universities who’s Aboriginal who
can supervise me. Because all the Aboriginal staff are – they’re either lowly academics or
they’re professional staff or there just simply aren’t any. [QP: 24]

The other doctoral student interviewed has a non-Indigenous Principal Supervisor and an
Indigenous Co-Supervisor. She commented:
Never had an issue as an undergrad or even a postgrad getting in touch with lecturers or
supervisors, I found they’re really quick with emails … I had some great mentoring, I’ve
had great supervisors, and they haven’t been Aboriginal. [CP: 5–6]

Additional pressures on these Indigenous HDRs include also being employed as staff
during candidature, and the ‘spotlight’ they feel under (see also Trudgett 2011). One
respondent was very clear about being a role model:
Interviewee: I take some of them under my wing. … I want the others to see that this is
doable, and that it is for them and it is for me, and you can do it. I don’t care what age
you are, how many kids you’ve got, it doesn’t matter, you can do it. If you want to do it,
you’ll do it … it motivates me, my way of giving back I suppose to the community now.
[CP: 12]

While many factors impact on the experiences and completion rates of Indigenous HDRs,
as with undergraduate students, the quality of their relationships with teaching staff and
supervisors appears fundamental to fostering their sense of place-attachment and identity
as a learner.

Pedagogical caring and other support

Most teaching staff in this research were unaware of how many Indigenous students are in
their classes or who they might be. This data is held in some administrative data banks but
staff either don’t know how to find out or chose not to. Some staff were interested, if ten-
tative, about identifying who is Indigenous:
Interviewee: It’s tough to know, because no one says here’s the list of who is and who isn’t.
252 J. CARTER ET AL.

Interviewer: But students haven’t identified themselves in class, or you can’t remember
context in which that’s happened?

Interviewee: No, none of them have really actually – that I can remember. There seem to be
some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, but again, they could have come from a
completely different culture. They didn’t explicitly say. [CA1: 5]

This respondent continued, linking Indigenous identification with the provision of cul-
tural information that might affect the student’s participation:
… the simple practical things that I mentioned, where it’s just letting us know – as long as the
student was happy to divulge that information, I understand there’s privacy issues some-
times. But to let us know either in written format or just conversationally and say, look,
this is where I’m from, and these are the sorts of things that I appreciate and these are the
sorts of things that are going to be tough for me as a result of my culture. [CA1: 10]

A senior Aboriginal academic commented:

I would imagine that academic staff are treating Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stu-
dents like everybody else because there are no identifiers [provided to staff]. [QA2: 12]

Another Aboriginal academic commented that she often is uncertain about students’
identities:
I believe that people have the right to identify. If people choose to identify then that’s their
right. They also have the right to not identify. I certainly depend on them identifying them-
selves to me. [CA3: 8]

Several teaching staff suggested that such knowledge is of little importance as they work
the same way with all students. A course coordinator of a massive first year course com-
mented that:
One of my problems is most of my interaction with my students is either via the phone or the
email. Unless they identify to me I have no idea. … The way that I work it makes no differ-
ence really. [CA4: 11]

This particular teacher has significant experience working with both Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander communities, and is not advocating a ‘color-blind’ approach
(Bonilla-Silva 2006; Stoll 2014). Rather he looks to individualize his support for the stu-
dent’s specific needs that include cultural and social factors. He noted that course coordi-
nators have more power to intervene to accommodate student distress or need than tutors
or lecturers. He provided this example:
I just had a student of Torres Strait Islander descent, had a family issue, had cultural respon-
sibilities they had to take care of, and I was able to modify the way they did their assessment.
So rather than doing a presentation in class we did it via Skype at a time that suited them. So I
allowed them to manage both their cultural responsibilities and our requirements of actually
needing them to get their assessment done. [CA4: 2]

Overall staff felt that if they knew students’ cultural identity, they could accommodate
their needs; however, most staff don’t know, and self-identification in class should not
be mandatory. This practical reality works against university policies that assume cul-
tural identities are transparent and not situationally managed by students. Strategies
to enhance Indigenous students’ sense of place and belonging require more flexible
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 253

and nuanced approaches that centre on academics’ ability to engage effectively with all
students.

Training for teaching staff

Several students felt that teaching staff were often unable to teach them effectively because
of implicit bias or ignorance on Indigenous history and cultures. This belief often led to a
recommendation for mandatory training:
Female: A lot of the time they’re perpetuating myths and stereotypes without knowledge of
the realities, but then professing to teach critical thinking, which is quite contradictory in
itself. So at a university level, at an institutional level, I honestly believe that all lecturers
and tutors should have some sort of grounding in something like SCS130 [foundation Indi-
genous studies course]. Something where they get some sort of actual understanding of how
them treating us as illegitimate, and our knowledge as illegitimate, perpetuates racism and
stereotypes, rather than embracing diversity. [CF2: 46]

Other students stressed more training was needed to enable staff to effectively embed Indi-
genous content in curriculum without stereotyping (cf. Hollinsworth 2016). This rec-
ommendation was seen as necessary for the learning of all students as much as for the
cultural safety of Indigenous ones.
A doctoral candidate also highlighted inadequacies in staff teaching about Indigenous
matters:
You look at the curriculum and you look at some of the staff, and I hear stories from students
about what the staff are teaching. I think the teachers need a really good dose of cultural com-
petency … that they’re not embedding [Indigenous perspectives] at all and when they do it’s
clumsy. It can be dangerous. So I think if the university really cared there would be a lot more
done with the staff, but I know it’s big and I know it involves a lot of funding, a lot of time,
which academic staff don’t really have. [CP: 16]

Teaching staff also called for more staff development, although there were differences in
whether such training would be cultural awareness, cultural safety or anti-racism
(Downing, Kowal, and Paradies 2011).
Aboriginal staff tended to call for specific attention in such training to white privilege
and racism rather than information about Indigenous cultural differences:
We need to be able to have an embedded program whereby staff who engage and staff who
don’t engage with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, get some training about what
that actually means. That would allow us then to have those conversations about race and
power. … How do we work to have those conversations that do interrogate race? So that
it’s a safer place, so that it’s not necessarily always as white as it has been. [QA2: 13]

A non-Indigenous academic agreed, suggesting:

We also have to start naming white privilege in talking about the limitations of the Euro-
centric stuff that you and I got originally brought up on, not just saying that we need to
learn about this other that’s sitting over here because it’s being interesting. Once you start
down that path it’s quite an ambitious path and it needs to be. [CA4, 19]

While the need for such an emphasis was flagged in the Universities Australia National
Best Practice Framework (2011, 78), critical race theory and explicit challenges to white
privilege may stretch universities’ willingness to open themselves up to major
254 J. CARTER ET AL.

transformations. Regardless of the particular emphasis on critical race theory versus cul-
tural competence, Rochecouste et al. (2016, 15) argue that:
[U]niversities need to take responsibility for the attitudes of their staff towards the relevant
professional development for improving understanding of Aboriginal history and culture. It
is no longer acceptable for educators to have no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and history.
Nor is it acceptable for the educator to single out an Aboriginal student to provide this
knowledge.

Because academic staff relationships with students are critical to student retention and
success, highlighting the university as a place is fundamentally social, staff needs for
enhanced professional development must be recognized and resourced to fully realize
the ambition to make Australian universities welcoming and supportive places for Indi-
genous students.

Institutional support for teaching staff

Universities Australia (2011) National Best Practice Framework recommends all univer-
sities implement Indigenous Cultural Competency, stressing the need for strong and sus-
tained leadership from university senior management. Andersen, Bunda, and Walter
(2008), Oliver et al. (2013) and Rochecouste et al. (2016) conclude that, despite significant
policy development and planning across the sector, most universities have been inconsist-
ent and partial in their implementation of strategies to improve retention and success for
Indigenous students. Day and Nolde’s (2009) study of Indigenous student experiences
reported institutional recognition of Indigenous people through flag-raising and events
was read as tokenistic, a concern expressed by staff and students in our study. One respon-
dent answered the question What’s your impression of the value that the university puts on
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? as follows:
Female: It always seems to be up to us to fight the racism, organise the special days, create the
events. The university needs to take that on and show that they’re genuine in their commit-
ment [CF2: 48–49].

Another said:
I think it very much varies. I think there are pockets of people and staff and departments that
really value. … We’ve obviously got the embedding program going on and I think that’s got
potential to do some really good work, particularly in areas where people don’t see how we
can do it. Nuts and bolts will be when we actually come to implementation and when we
actually start dealing with resistance. Because it’s quite easy at the moment to say we’re
doing all this because it’s actually the people who are involved are supportive. It’s once we
start trying to get a mathematician who actually doesn’t want to see, doesn’t understand
it, then that’s when the push comes to shove about as an organisation what are we – how
far are we willing to go to get this happening? [CA4: 18]

The same interviewee highlighted the intensification of workload stress on academic staff
as universities move to more audits and metrics in pursuit of better research outputs and
cost-effective teaching:
Interviewee: We’re growing rapidly, so that puts pressure on staff. Once you put pressure on
staff in terms of workloads, people will go okay to be able to get my work done I need to be
less available for a whole range of activities, not just student related ones. I think if you’re
 TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION 255

going to aim for a five star teaching organisation then you need to resource it as such …
When you start building student numbers and you want to keep your five star teaching
thing and students have accessibility, then something else has to give. [CA4: 3–4]

All the staff interviewed held continuous or fixed-term appointments, but time pressures
and lack of capacity to communicate with and mentor students are even more difficult for
casuals who now make up 40% of Australian university employees (Halse 2016, 6).
Students are often painfully aware of these increasing pressures of staff as they are
reflected in less time to talk outside of class, much larger class sizes, delays in responding
to emails and other problems shown to hinder student engagement and encourage attri-
tion, especially in low SES and Indigenous students (Anon 2011; Devlin 2013; Asmar,
Page, and Radloff 2015; Curtis et al. 2015). One focus group not only reported staff
were becoming unwell and overwhelmed by these pressures, but that they were reluctant
to bother them with questions:
Male: I feel like the uni has been doing a bit of cost-cutting lately and a lot of my teachers,
they’re now completely overwhelmed with some of their workloads. But now that the uni is
cutting down on the time they can spend with students and the time they have to themselves
as well.

Female: Bigger classes.

Male: Yeah, and I’ve seen like some of my lecturers starting to show signs of stress just
because their workload has been upped a lot.

Facilitator: How does that affect you?

Male: Well you do miss out on some of the support. But even just for the lecturers themselves,
like the teaching quality drops sometimes because they are just so stressed, all of them. Some
of them are having to cancel some of their classes because they just can’t go to that class and
they’re just too busy.

Female: Really tired, worn out. You don’t want to burden them with …

Male: Yeah, and it’s just like I don’t really want to hit some of them up when I need help,
because they already have so much on their plate. [CF2: 49–50]

All universities, but especially those with less impressive research income and regional
campuses with many first in family students, risk fundamental damage to their brand if
their reputations for teaching excellence fall. Equally they risk seeing static or increasing
attrition rates for Indigenous students, regardless of increasing enrolment rates (Gale and
Parker 2013; Pechenkina 2015). Fundamentally, these student experiences contribute to
their sense of that university as a welcoming, inclusive place or not, and to their ability
to foster the crucial social relations within those places that will help them persist with
their studies.

Conclusion
Several of our findings replicated the ten proposals for action to improve student engage-
ment presented by Zepke and Leach (2010) in their extensive literature review. In particu-
lar, they stressed that teaching and teachers were ‘at the heart of engagement’ (2010, 170)
and that all effective learning is relational. The university place, in our study, was founded
256 J. CARTER ET AL.

on social relations, especially between academic staff and Indigenous students, but the
quality of these relationships are dependent on external factors including professional
development opportunities, workload, and other institutional pressures. Zepke and
Leach (2010) further emphasized the critical role of institutional support for such
active, collaborative learning, something our research found was lacking and under
specific stress given neoliberal pursuit of productivity gains. This is of particular note
given that current university policies generally declare a commitment to embed Indigen-
ous content in curriculum and to enhance academic success for Indigenous higher edu-
cation students, while staff remain lacking in confidence, relatively under-qualified in
such work and increasingly required to perform these tasks without adequate workload
recognition. Such conditions legitimize the reluctance of some staff who fail to see the
need for these initiatives and make the efforts of those more committed to those tasks
increasingly unrealistic. This research suggests that without a much more consistent
and sustained commitment from senior management with adequate resourcing and eva-
luative tools, these challenges will remain largely unaddressed in the foreseeable future.
Universities can lament relatively poor retention and completion of Indigenous students,
but until they focus much more attention on academics’ capacity to develop students’ self-
efficacy and a sense of belonging, and less attention on increasing student recruitment,
there will be only incremental improvement.
Fundamentally, if the university is to be a place of welcome and comfort to enable Indi-
genous students’ learning, then the relational aspects of the place, particularly the social
transactions that enable learning, must be central. As Relph (1976) and Tuan (1977)
assert, humans attach value and meaning to a locale in ways that have positive or negative
implications for them. The social relationships that create student attachment to the uni-
versity place, and the emotional reinforcement of one’s identity as a learner who belongs in
the university place is made, not found or given. We argue that academics can ‘make’ uni-
versity places in their pedagogies and mentoring roles, but require universities to recognize
this pedagogical caring as a legitimate and valued element of their work.

Acknowledgements
The authors thank all students and staff who participated in this research; and the two anonymous
reviewers for their constructive comments on the draft manuscript.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Office for Learning and Teaching [Grant number SD15-5165].

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