Audio file MITN Webinar - Understanding Generation Z_M - beliefs, motivations, and student diversity_ The relationship between friendship groups and modern university Muslim student identities.mp4 Transcript 00:00:02 Helena Wall So Fatema go ahead. 00:00:05 Fatema Khatun Thank you for that, Helena. So my thesis. 00:00:09 Fatema Khatun Is kind of. 00:00:10 Fatema Khatun In its early days of and it's predominantly come from working in kind of modern universities, so looking at not your red bricks, but your post 92. 00:00:24 Fatema Khatun And I'm looking at kind of the relationship between friendship groups and student identity and how those friendship groups within a particular generation affect how they operate in a university or educational space. 00:00:42 Fatema Khatun So my research questions are as follows. 00:00:48 Fatema Khatun UM. 00:00:51 Fatema Khatun Sorry, how do non traditional and visibly homogeneous Muslim student social groups organise themselves in HG spaces and and I've used the kind of term non traditional in. 00:01:04 Fatema Khatun Inverted commas because it's a term that's used quite frequently in literature to essentially defamiliarize any student, or particularly students that are not from a certain ethnic background or certain economic status. 00:01:23 Fatema Khatun So predominantly your working class students, your BME students, uh, your mature students are seen as non traditional students and I'm I'm looking at how such labels and when they look physically similar has an effect on how they organise themselves in HG spaces. The second question is what are the possible rationales? 00:01:44 Fatema Khatun For students for choosing to organise themselves into these distinct social networks, and why do they think that it's useful? 00:01:52 Fatema Khatun Do they notice that they've done that and and what are the impacts? 00:01:57 Fatema Khatun Of organising into these groups and you know for the student. 00:02:02 Fatema Khatun And three, how do these distinct socially organised networks or friendship groups create or affect their member sense of belonging in HG Spaces? 00:02:12 Fatema Khatun Because these friendship groups, as I'm learning now at the moment quite often are not just in the HG space, they they do tend to. 00:02:21 Fatema Khatun Extend outwards and quite a lot of them are familial relations. Others are peers from other educational spaces or from the local area. 00:02:31 Fatema Khatun How did that? How does that affect their sense of belonging in a modern university? 00:02:38 Fatema Khatun So kind of the background literature that I've been looking at, it's very much about marketization and how that has created A2 tier system in education. 00:02:50 Fatema Khatun And you know that favours certain universities over others, but how that idealised system has created a consumer market. 00:03:01 Fatema Khatun For you know in. 00:03:02 Fatema Khatun And essentially, we are selling our degrees as a product of happiness and the emphasis on those structures. So things like TEF and ref and how they have an impact on education and the experiences of students. So currently there's. 00:03:22 Fatema Khatun A lot of discussions around the B AME attainment gap and statistics show that it's the 13% attainment in comparison to their White County. 00:03:33 Fatema Khatun UM and. 00:03:35 Fatema Khatun This is across the sector, irrespective of what university is, but this is particularly interesting. 00:03:42 Fatema Khatun Points for modern universities when they've got things such as the AIM, higher programmes or widening participation programmes in order to bring in these so-called non traditional students. 00:03:58 Fatema Khatun And my kind of research actually originates from research that I did at masters level and this is a small exit from a research article that was just published I. 00:04:11 Fatema Khatun Think it was two weeks. 00:04:13 Fatema Khatun Ago today and and it was talking about knowledge and belonging. 00:04:18 Fatema Khatun And how our sense of belonging is very much related to our bodies, because in academia, well in the space of academia, quite often there's a a disconnect between body and. 00:04:31 Fatema Khatun The mind and you know the Cartesian dualism is ignored. You know, we tend to favour knowledge and the mind over the experiences of the body and what I'm suggesting here is that actually, in order to understand belonging and to appreciate our students. 00:04:52 Fatema Khatun We need to. 00:04:54 Fatema Khatun Understand or experience, not experience, understand and appreciate that the kind of visual embodiments and and bodies in these spaces need to be. 00:05:07 Fatema Khatun Examined need to be explored and need to be appreciated. 00:05:16 Fatema Khatun And it's kind of a very much about reciprocity as well. So my original research was looking at staff and how we would share intimate spaces with our students and how that will lead to. 00:05:29 Fatema Khatun A performance of the self and and. 00:05:34 Fatema Khatun By doing it in the modern university and doing it with Generation Z or generation M or doing it with non traditional students, we saw that there was a strong correlation between the cultures of the students home. 00:05:47 Fatema Khatun Lives and how successful they felt in academic institutions, and it was about creating 1/3 space. And this is something that I'll talk about in a bit more detail afterwards and and how kind of marketization and the need for certain curriculums and the the structures of our courses. 00:06:08 Fatema Khatun Can devalue the cultural backgrounds that these some of these students have. 00:06:12 Fatema Khatun Come from and and as a result it can you know it conditions them to become quite defensive or or conceal parts of themselves because they feel that their bodies and their knowledges don't exist or. 00:06:25 Fatema Khatun And are not authentic enough to exist in an educational space, so the original research that I did was having students bring in identity boxes so they they would fill them in, fill them up with things that they felt represented themselves. And we also did this with staff members. 00:06:45 Fatema Khatun As well. So it was like a cascade. 00:06:47 Fatema Khatun Doing a research project so it started off with staff members and then it was staff and students and then it was students sharing amongst themselves. 00:06:55 Fatema Khatun And it was really intimate and it was really. 00:06:58 Fatema Khatun Fun and it was really nice. 00:07:04 Fatema Khatun It was. It was really nice to hear people's stories because quite often the object itself had quite a long or very interesting story. 00:07:15 Fatema Khatun And through that story, the students would reveal parts of culture, parts of their identity that wouldn't have otherwise come up in. 00:07:23 Fatema Khatun A educational space. 00:07:29 Fatema Khatun And so I'm kind of. 00:07:30 Fatema Khatun Going to go back and kind of rehash some of the kind of background literature about class so. 00:07:39 Fatema Khatun You know, Mike Savage talks about working class students or working class as a as a strata and how it's been defined and redefined. So originally the kind of working class. 00:07:56 Fatema Khatun Is like your older males that were serving, you know, or participating in labour work. But that's changed as a result of kind of post war. Britain and Massification and widening participation schemes. So in redefining class. 00:08:15 Fatema Khatun Structures using Borger, Savage acknowledges that the working class as a traditional group among the bottom half of society. 00:08:24 Fatema Khatun So what's happened is kind of through industrialization and rapid use of technology, our understandings or our labelling of working class has changed. 00:08:37 Fatema Khatun So along with the precariat, which is what we. 00:08:39 Fatema Khatun Traditionally, define as low income families. There is the kind of emergent service workers. 00:08:46 Fatema Khatun And this is where. 00:08:47 Fatema Khatun A lot of. 00:08:48 Fatema Khatun My potential students fit in to the character degree, so they are. They quite often come from low economic status. Backgrounds are BME students and come from polar regions such as like polar region. 00:09:02 Fatema Khatun One or two. 00:09:06 Fatema Khatun They they work precariously and they usually have. 00:09:11 Fatema Khatun Are lacking in a stable career, so they they they join the university with the intention of having a degree programme that will get them a stable job. So quite often in, you know, my in my. 00:09:23 Fatema Khatun Area it's education and early years, so that's the kind of social sorry economic. 00:09:31 Fatema Khatun Stability that they're looking for, but not, you know, it doesn't quite often translate as well for a lot of my students. 00:09:41 Fatema Khatun So it's about tackling that gap. So we've we've quite, you know we've seen that there is a gap in BME achievement and so we've got the widened participation policies, there's a renewed focus on belonging in haichi. 00:09:58 Fatema Khatun And kind of Thomas has shown us that student retention and success relies on this idea of a multifaceted approach and and kind of fostering a greater sense of belonging for at risk students and at risk, students are again another synonymous with non traditional students synonymous with BA. 00:10:18 Fatema Khatun Many students. 00:10:20 Fatema Khatun And and this is where my research kind of fits in. Stevenson discovered that despite like a lot of research happening, universities generally fail to adopt A sense of belonging. 00:10:30 Fatema Khatun And this was not considered. 00:10:31 Fatema Khatun A cultural or ethnic issue, but a general failure to engage and offer support for those in need. 00:10:38 Fatema Khatun And this is. 00:10:39 Fatema Khatun Because we often take a top down approach and it relies on quantitative data, so GNSS, Leo, data etc. To overcome issues of belonging when actually we need a bottom up approach. 00:10:55 Fatema Khatun So that kind of leads us on to hybridity and identity, so. 00:11:02 Fatema Khatun What I've discovered or what's kind of been quite apparent, is that because my students are quite often non traditional students, they are doing what is known. 00:11:13 Fatema Khatun As edge walking. 00:11:14 Fatema Khatun So it's a hybridised identity where they are taking two distinct social groups. 00:11:19 Fatema Khatun And merging them together in an educational space. 00:11:25 Fatema Khatun And in kind of education, hybridity is wielded as a term to describe the experiences of working class students as they negotiate their identity along the journey through mainstream education. 00:11:38 Fatema Khatun And sometimes into Haichi, UM, Diane Ray talks a lot about it in her research about how there's heavy psychic costs to edge walking and hybridised identity. 00:11:52 Fatema Khatun And that's something that I'm quite interested in and. 00:11:56 Fatema Khatun That's where the social networking and the friendship groups. 00:12:01 Fatema Khatun Are going to be a point of examination is to see whether those those friendship groups are a way of negotiating identity and whether it's some way of relieving that psychic cost that Diane Ray was talking about. 00:12:20 Fatema Khatun And this is a bit more information about hybridity. So Dubois raises the concept of double consciousness to describe experiences of the black community in the US, whereby they look at oneself through the eyes of others. 00:12:36 Fatema Khatun Beverly Tatum talks about this as well and she she just describes it as selective inattention. 00:12:43 Fatema Khatun So we know that these particular friendship groups or networks are happening, but we choose to ignore them because we feel that they are quite uncomfortable spaces because we will have to deal with issues of gender discrimination, racial or racist ideologies. 00:13:04 Fatema Khatun We have to combat religious identities, and that's something that's quite uncomfortable, so we choose to selectively ignore it. 00:13:16 Fatema Khatun Uh and? 00:13:19 Fatema Khatun Kind of the experiences of working class students. 00:13:22 Fatema Khatun In the UK. 00:13:25 Fatema Khatun Is very similar to that of the experiences of the black community in the US, but it's not necessarily exactly the same, but it's a nice analogy. 00:13:34 Fatema Khatun To start to explore my own research through. 00:13:40 Fatema Khatun Umm so constructing 1/3 space so. 00:13:45 Fatema Khatun This kind of is born from Barbara's ideas of hybridised identity, and we've got the. 00:13:55 Fatema Khatun 2-3 uh two. 00:13:57 Fatema Khatun Circles on the outside which are your home and university. 00:14:01 Fatema Khatun And how they are contrasting spaces. So in the university you've got your academia, your formal learning, your new modes of communication, and then you've got your. 00:14:10 Fatema Khatun Home sort of cultures which are your pop culture, your multimodal texts, your social media. 00:14:16 Fatema Khatun Which is you. 00:14:17 Fatema Khatun Know on the rise, especially with generation said. 00:14:21 Fatema Khatun And what I'm trying to say, what what I'm trying to do is explore that third space that the students have created by merging popular culture, social media and academia with new modes of communication and formal learning. 00:14:37 Fatema Khatun A colleague of mine is really actually interested in 3rd space and is looking at how informal spaces in pop culture such as football can be used in academia as well, and so I'm doing something similar, but it's looking at how those friendship groups can create those third spaces. 00:14:59 Fatema Khatun So what could 1/3 space look like in practise? So it's about, uh, possibly developing a culturally responsive pedagogy, and this is something that I'm interested in and hopefully wanting to do post doctoral conceptualising theory through pop culture. And that's something that became quite. 00:15:19 Fatema Khatun Apparent in the identity activity that I did with my students quite often their cultural touchstones are very different to the ones that we use in academia. 00:15:30 Fatema Khatun So that's a possible route through which we can create a greater sense of belonging and also create a sense of validation for the identities that are presented. 00:15:42 Fatema Khatun To us in the classroom. 00:15:45 Fatema Khatun Some of the issues. 00:15:46 Fatema Khatun That ohh uh I found is who takes the first step into third space. That's something that I'm grappling with at the moment. Is it our responsibility as staff members to create or assist students in creating? 00:16:01 Fatema Khatun 1/3 space and and how does that have an impact on power and agency and identity? If I'm taking the lead in creating that fair space? 00:16:13 Fatema Khatun And assisting students to underpin or make meaning of their own experiences through that theory. So it kind of comes back to who has power in that third space, and how do we use pop culture or their understandings of identity to conceptualise theory and decolonizing. The curriculum is something. 00:16:32 Fatema Khatun At the moment that's very heavy on everyone's mind and. 00:16:37 Fatema Khatun I think it was Jason Arday who's talking about. 00:16:42 Fatema Khatun Removing barriers and. 00:16:46 Fatema Khatun Not relying on. 00:16:48 Fatema Khatun Quantitative data running more because we've got the quantitative data to prove that institutions are looking favourably towards. 00:16:59 Fatema Khatun Constructions of empire, et cetera, which we need to now refashion in order to kind of meet the needs of our students. 00:17:10 Fatema Khatun So this brings me back to why me, why now, and essentially the title of this? 00:17:17 Fatema Khatun Series or this presentation generation M are Muslim millennials, and they are the global generation born in the last 30 years. 00:17:27 Fatema Khatun And as a result, the students that I have coming into my university or coming into my seminar classes and my lectures have not experienced a world outside of 911, and I've used that as like a cultural touchstone because that was kind of the turning point for things like. 00:17:49 Fatema Khatun Well, the turning point for understanding terrorism in a westernised fashion and it has led on to things like the prevent strategy, it's the development of the Counter Terrorism Act and those things and how they've had an impact on students who have never existed or have never experienced life. 00:18:10 Fatema Khatun Before 911 and why I've chosen the term generation M is because one thing that generation M supposedly having contract in. 00:18:24 Fatema Khatun In common is this overriding characteristic that they believe that being faithful and living a modern life go hand in hand and there is absolutely no contradiction between the two? 00:18:36 Fatema Khatun So it what's interesting about generation M, which supposedly is that there's this meshing of modern life and being true or being faithful to Islamic. 00:18:52 Fatema Khatun And we see we see it more and more now through advertisements, et cetera. There is a push for things such as like halal food, the commodification of the hijab. 00:19:06 Fatema Khatun Kind of more Muslim models and diversity and representation. 00:19:11 Fatema Khatun But again, that comes back to that idea of marketization that I was talking about and how certain identities are being produced or. 00:19:19 Fatema Khatun UM. 00:19:21 Fatema Khatun Sold as packets of happiness. 00:19:24 Fatema Khatun So that kind of relates to my insider status as a post con. 00:19:29 Fatema Khatun Constructivist Marxist Islamic feminist research. So I have, you know, popped down some very interesting titles and I think that's where I sort of fit into these categories. So I'm I'm pushing boundaries and moving between these ideas of. 00:19:45 Fatema Khatun What reality and what knowledges are and how do they fit in with marketization and my students and it's Islamic and feminist? 00:19:55 Fatema Khatun Because I am of the faith and it's feminist research because I want to see how the experiences of being particularly Muslim women. 00:20:06 Fatema Khatun Or Muslim woman has on those, uhm, educational senses of belonging? 00:20:14 Fatema Khatun Umm, so godliness and education, so Abdul Rashid says I write as an act of worship, which is very, you know, very eloquently frames the complexities of. 00:20:26 Fatema Khatun My PhD and how I'm writing and the commitments of being a teacher or a lecturer in creating a classroom. 00:20:34 Fatema Khatun That is nurturing the kind of physical, mental and spiritual well-being of my students. 00:20:41 Fatema Khatun And that's where kind of my ethical considerations for my research have come in from it's the closeness or the spirituality and and the Connexions that I feel can be created between students and staff and students through education. 00:21:01 Fatema Khatun As a spiritual process. 00:21:05 Fatema Khatun So both education and acts of worship in the spheres of the British Muslim experience have been revolutionary acts. So the kind of construction of a British ohhh, a Muslim woman in in media, for example, kind of David Cameron's comments in. 00:21:25 Fatema Khatun 2014 about. 00:21:29 Fatema Khatun Introducing ESOL, more ESOL classes for Muslim women in order to accommodate or. 00:21:36 Fatema Khatun To prevent them from slipping into terrorism. So those are kind of the constructions of. 00:21:43 Fatema Khatun Identity that British Muslim women have to counteract on a regular basis. 00:21:49 Fatema Khatun So by choosing to be or choosing to present themselves as Muslim and also existing in an educational space, are often seen as revolutionary acts that counteract the current narrative that's been written about them historically. We've seen the powers of empire have. 00:22:09 Fatema Khatun Kind of suppressed Muslim women through these ideas of exoticism, you know, quite often they're seen as space invaders and. 00:22:17 Fatema Khatun They are occupying unnatural habitat, so they are occupying spaces in education, especially HEA, that don't necessarily belong to them. 00:22:27 Fatema Khatun So in doing so, education has become a political act and a place of revolution. 00:22:37 Fatema Khatun So kind of mobilising the language of education. 00:22:40 Fatema Khatun Research discourse while simultaneously capturing the spiritual and ethical considerations of the researcher. 00:22:48 Fatema Khatun Has led to. 00:22:49 Fatema Khatun Kind of writing in modes of crisis. 00:22:51 Fatema Khatun And that's where I found myself, particularly during the pandemic that I'm writing in modes of crisis and. And it's quite angry writing. It's quite polemic writing. 00:23:05 Fatema Khatun And they're quite reflective writing. 00:23:07 Fatema Khatun But I'm in this kind of space where I'm. 00:23:11 Fatema Khatun Choosing to commit acts of transgression, so I'm choosing to defy academic conventions, push against the boundaries of academic writing in order to present. 00:23:24 Fatema Khatun What I feel might be the most valid or authentic spaces. 00:23:32 Fatema Khatun Accounts of my students. 00:23:36 Fatema Khatun And by also. 00:23:37 Fatema Khatun You know, doing that during my writing, but I'm also trying to do that in my experiences or in my teaching as well, where I'm trying to create holistic spaces for individuals that are kind of entrenched in a market sized HD space where we're very much focused on. 00:23:53 Fatema Khatun Kind of. 00:23:54 Fatema Khatun End product outcome focused on you know, getting them through the next year, focusing on assignments et cetera. But instead of doing that kind of diverting attention to a more holistic visualised experience. 00:24:14 Fatema Khatun So kind of the observed phenomena. Uh, how did I come across this idea? So as a visiting lecturer, I quite quite often noticed that friendship groups. 00:24:25 Fatema Khatun Formed especially, you know, in the very first couple of weeks of. 00:24:31 Fatema Khatun Being in a, A a university space, students start to pick out groups that they become quite familiar with and and friendship groups, and they become quite obvious as a educator that you know those those students are always late or those students are always. 00:24:49 Fatema Khatun Missing assignment deadlines or those students are always at the front, and they're always answering questions, so I can rely on them. So you start to build. 00:24:58 Fatema Khatun Kind of a. 00:25:01 Fatema Khatun A vision of what those students will be like based on those friendship groups. 00:25:06 Fatema Khatun And UM, So what I call them is pods. So they're like 2 peas in a pod. Anyone who has shell peas would know, of course, that peas are not only alike. And that seeing them as being alike is already to overlook some of the important differences. 00:25:22 Fatema Khatun So because these friendships, particularly these young Muslim women, are kind of banding together quite often, we. 00:25:31 Fatema Khatun Overlook the differences that they have and start to create a stereotyped or a particular pedagogical response to those behaviours without really noticing what they are or what they actually need. 00:25:49 Fatema Khatun And it kind of reminds me of quite a few anecdotes. So. 00:25:54 Fatema Khatun And that's where my research started to kind of form was when I had a a group of students who would come to tutorials and they would always come together and and only one of them would ask a question. 00:26:06 Fatema Khatun And quite often it was a question that they all had, but they wouldn't. They were too afraid to come on their own, so they would come together. 00:26:14 Fatema Khatun And despite the fact that I would tell them that they are individual tutorials and they should be coming with their assignments to speak to me about them and they didn't feel confident enough to do that. So they would come to these spaces in these pods. 00:26:29 Fatema Khatun And it's about not necessarily breaking those pods apart, but to understand. 00:26:36 Fatema Khatun How those pods operate and why they feel the need to operate in such ways? 00:26:42 Fatema Khatun So my research design and the participant recruitment is using purposive samples, so these are students that I'm teaching within my bubbles. So when I talk about bubbles and these are students that I've taught over. 00:26:56 Fatema Khatun The last two academic years. So I've built a relationship with them and and I'm kind of aware of how. 00:27:04 Fatema Khatun Or I'm aware of the pods so I'm quite familiar with how these groups are operating in my spaces of in my spaces as a a tutor. 00:27:15 Fatema Khatun I'm I'm going to set up a listening room that's been inspired by Heron. So Heron looks at. 00:27:20 Fatema Khatun Friendship groups. But she looks at it in a particular. 00:27:23 Fatema Khatun That way, and essentially what I'm going to do. 00:27:26 Fatema Khatun Is set up. 00:27:27 Fatema Khatun Socially distant physical or teams meeting and provide cue sheets where the students can share objects and discuss within their friendship groups and and I'll be leaving them alone so the students will have an hour alone to discuss the topics that I provide. 00:27:43 Fatema Khatun And the objects that they've come to. 00:27:45 Fatema Khatun Share with their own peers. 00:27:47 Fatema Khatun Once that's done, I will review and reflect with in individual Members, so I will have a one to one meeting with those participants in that pod and ask them about particular responses that they might have had or particular objects that they've chosen to share. 00:28:06 Fatema Khatun And it kind of lends itself to creating methodologies because it's reconceptualizing. 00:28:14 Fatema Khatun Methods or reconceptualizing my ideas as a or my position as a researcher by giving power back to the students and and it's about kind of. 00:28:26 Fatema Khatun Creating a narrative or a narrative that they can have control over as opposed to a narrative that I may have control over. 00:28:38 Fatema Khatun And why I've chosen to do it as boxes or objects is because objects in in themselves don't carry much meaning. 00:28:50 Fatema Khatun However, once they kind of come together and students start talking about them, they are underpinned by stories that are quite significant. 00:28:58 Fatema Khatun And help people. 00:29:00 Fatema Khatun Articulate certain things about their identity. So. 00:29:05 Fatema Khatun If I was to. 00:29:07 Fatema Khatun Talk about myself right now. I find it quite. 00:29:09 Fatema Khatun Difficult, but if I was. 00:29:11 Fatema Khatun Able to do it through objects quite often those stories have a a nice sort of flow to them and they are. 00:29:22 Fatema Khatun A lot easier for data collection as well I've noticed. 00:29:25 Fatema Khatun As opposed to asking students just to tell me about themselves. 00:29:30 Fatema Khatun So usually what I would do is at this point, ask Helena to stop recording and ask everyone to share an object that they might have near themselves and talk about that and understand how that might build a possible connexion or intimacy between a group or friends. 00:29:50 Fatema Khatun And but I don't know if you've got much time for that. 00:29:56 Helena Wall What do we think? 00:29:57 Helena Wall Jo, are we game or? 00:30:02 Jo Angouri I think we are. 00:30:04 Helena Wall OK, I I shall hold the recording then at this point and we can all get in a little bit. 00:30:12 Helena Wall Of interactivity in.