Student Communities

At the University of Sheffield we are in the preparatory phase of a project to evaluate the ways in which student communities develop on campus, and how these enrich the student experience in its broadest sense.   

By communities we are thinking of social networks, the experience of community in academic departments, virtual communities like facebook, student societies, faith based groups, community-building in our residences, etc.  Issues around student interface with the local (city) community are not the primary focus, but I suspect we will need to reference these in some way within the work.

I am aware of considerable US research on the concept of student community development, including some use of the "College and University Community Inventory", developed within NASPA.

I am keen to make contact with colleagues here who are already working on, or considering work on, this issue.  If you could contact me off-list, that would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in anticipation.

Andrew West

Director of Student Services, The University of Sheffield

a.west@sheffield.ac.uk

Comments

[Christopher Hallas]

I wonder whether your call for contacts would receive a greater response if it was posted via the aua-forum rather than this blog (which I'm looking at again because I was prompted to do so yesterday).

Rather than institutional experience, I would point you in the first instance to a great article which I came across when researching how students may form senses of affinity with their course cohorts, departments, schools or institutions:

"Self, space and place: youth identitities and citizenship" British Journal of Sociology of Education, Volume 20, Number 4, 1999; Hall T, Coffey A and Williamson H.

Good luck!

[Andrew West]

Thanks for this lead, which is very useful. In retrospect the wording of my initial post is not particularly conducive to sparking off a discussion on the blog, which would also be good.

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