Students’ negotiations of belonging in geoscience: experiences of faculty–student interactions when entering university

Abstract

In this study, we explore how interactions with faculty influence first-year geoscience students’ negotiations of belonging in a study programme. We situate the study within the field of retention and use the concepts of belonging and culture to analyse our empirical material, collected through ethnographic fieldwork. We explore how faculty–student interactions during geoscientific fieldwork and in an “interview exercise” give students access to explicit and tacit knowledge about doing geoscience research, the department culture and possible careers in geoscience. The analysis shows that faculty–student interactions offer important avenues for the students’ negotiations of how they belong in the study programme (who they are) and in assessing their future possibilities (who they want to become). However, while positive for some students, the perceived needs to be highly devoted to the discipline and to perform in the field poses challenges for other students’ sense of belonging in the geoscience programme. By situating activities in the wider context of the culture of the study programme and analysing the combined effect of different faculty–students interactions, we find that institutions must offer first-year students possibilities for creating a sense of belonging that are varied, authentic and inclusive.