Investigating Staff and Student Belonging in a Further Education College through Innovative Participatory Game Based Research

In the world of education, belonging has been conceptualised as the affective and emotional dimension of students’ experiences at school. However, one aspect that has been overlooked is that of space. How space affords, neglects, or enhances students’ belonging is still unexplored. We adopt a sociological lens to explore school belonging that acknowledges its innate relations with power, our bodies and emotions, and the politics of non-belonging. The focus of this paper on space and belonging did not originate from our realisation of the marginal role of space in research but through a Participatory Game Based Research (PGBR). Our PGBR adopted a participatory and innovative methodology in one Further Education College (FEC) in the South of England. It was participatory because staff in the FEC acted as co-researchers who had a say in the creation of research questions, collection, and analysis of data. After receiving workshops on belonging and research skills, the co-researchers chose to focus on space and belonging, i.e. what areas of the school fostered or hindered school belonging. The research revealed some surprising findings, e.g. that students tend to feel that common areas are not theirs and that overall, they feel a stronger sense of belonging when they are in their home subject areas, contrary to what staff was expecting, which is the focus of this paper. These findings were later converted into a game that allows players, in this case staff, to experience the school from the perspective of students.