“I Can Belong to Anything I Set My Mind To”: Participation, co-creation and the student experience
Rimi Khan, Eugenia Zoubtchenko
2019
Melbourne Social Equity Institute, University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne’s New Student Precinct (NSP) is a major infrastructure development at the Parkville campus including nine buildings and 37,050m2 of new or refurbished building and landscape space. The NSP replaces existing student amenities concentrated in Union House, and aims to provide an enhanced student experience, combining innovative forms of built design and physical infrastructure with new opportunities for cultural connection, participation and transformation. Due to open in 20212022, the NSP also responds to the needs of the University’s growing and diversifying student cohort.
The NSP development poses the question of what the responsibility of the University is towards its students. The NSP is committed to ‘co-creating’ with students, inviting them to participate in the governance, design and activation of the space. A co-creation approach to precinct development positions the University as a civic actor, accountable for the governance and engagement of its student constituencies.
This report is motivated by the question of how to understand the University of Melbourne’s students as a community. Students are more mobile, diverse and ambitious than before, but they are also faced with new forms of precarity and insecurity. Students today have a strong ‘sense of purpose’ but are less engaged with the university than in previous decades (Baik et al 2015).
Co-creation has the potential to address these forms of insecurity and disconnection. There are currently limited opportunities for students to contribute to decisionmaking about the spaces and programs they participate in. In this respect, the NSP’s co-creation strategy is an important test case for wider structures of student consultation, engagement and participatory decision-making across the University.
The report’s title reflects a tension: students seek ways to belong to the University community, but this depends on their own resources and initiative. There is a need for structures of inclusion, participation and collaboration that better support this desire to belong. Belonging also contributes to citizenship. This research offers new ways of thinking about the University’s role in creating engaged citizens in diverse communities that reach both within and beyond its campuses.