Can a student feel they belong the moment they arrive, or does belonging always have to be earned?
Why the question matters
I want all students to feel they belong the moment they get here, and that turns a hope into a design question. If Walton and Cohen are right that doubt about fit accumulates and drags achievement down on its own, then the first days are where that doubt starts rather than where it is finally dealt with. Osterman finds adult behavior to be one of the main things deciding whether a student feels part of a school community, and most of that behavior happens before a student has done any work at all — a name read correctly, a hallway greeting, a form that asks where you are from as if the answer is welcome. In a school whose student body has changed faster than its habits, arrival is the one experience every student shares.
What I currently think
My hunch is that the unwritten rules are learned fastest in the first week — Jackson's hidden curriculum, absorbed in a matter of days — and that a student made to feel a guest in that first week spends the rest of the year catching up to a belonging their enrollment already granted them. On the question itself I have settled in one direction: I do not think belonging is earned at all. It is up to the community to embrace you and bring the belonging to you — not the other way around. The burden lands on the adults and the room, not the newcomer. And it is not only the adults: the older students in the building carry belonging as role models for the younger ones, who never have to earn it. The community lives belonging; the youngest members simply arrive inside a practice that is already underway. What I still do not know is how a community does that on purpose: what it takes for the welcome to be built into the first hour rather than left to whoever happens to be kind that day, and whether the school that says you belong the moment you arrive is prepared to keep saying it on the hard days — when a grade goes wrong or a rule gets broken — or whether belonging quietly becomes conditional again the first time someone is disappointed.
What I am reading & learning
- —Baumeister & Leary (1995), The need to belong
- —Osterman (2000), Students' need for belonging in the school community
- —Walton & Cohen (2007), A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement
- —Jackson (1968), The hidden curriculum in education
- —Harley (2023), The lived experiences of Black girls at a predominantly White independent school
Related journal entries
- The Dreamkeepers, and the teachers I want to learn from
I love Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Dreamkeepers chapter of her culturally relevant teaching work most of all. She found the teachers who actually succeeded with African American children and studied what they did. That is the standard I want my research measured against — and the reason narrative inquiry is the right method for it.
- Room for the mess
Teaching can be messy and should be, because life is. The planning is not there to prevent the mess — it is what makes the mess worth paying attention to when it shows up.