Oceania Students Identify Institutional Barriers of Belonging to One University in Hawai’i

• In Event: Reframing Higher Education for Indigenous Peoples: Embracing Indigenous Perspectives and Empowering Future Generations

Abstract

This study identifies institutional factors identified by ninety-seven Oceania transnational students that supported or undermined a sense of belonging at one university in Hawai’i. Using both western conceptions of school belonging, as well as oceanic notions of vā, focus groups interviews were analyzed for how students described factors that promoted or inhibited their sense of belonging, or belonging to the vā. Students described several factors that fostered their feelings of belonging on campus, as well as several institutional barriers that undermined their feelings of belonging, highlighting institutional policies and procedures that pitted their belonging on campus against cultural and indigenous ways of knowing and being in their cultural communities—threatening their connection to the vā.

Authors

• Grace Taito Tora, Pacific Theological College, Fiji

• Erika Feinauer, Brigham Young University

• Spencer Scanlan, Brigham Young University - Hawaii