I often read in the first-gen student literature about the importance of a sense of "belonging" for student success and retention. It's common for researchers to explore how to deepen first-gen students' "belonging" through such things as extracurricular activities, leadership opportunities, community-building events for first-gen students, or personal connections to faculty All are good for building social and emotional ties to others on campus, and all focus primarily on how first-gen students themselves might learn to navigate these new relationships and activities.
It is much less common to find studies that instead document the social interactions within extracurricular activities or faculty encounters that communicate to first-gen students that they do not belong in the first place.
I therefore dove into Bonnie Stewart and Thu Thi Kim Le's new paper Mapping Belonging in Higher Education: Tracing Relationality Across Digital and Place-Based Literature. I've followed Bonnie Stewart's deeply thoughtful work on digital education for years, and have long appreciated her critical perspectives on educational discourse.
Here, Stewart and Le consider "belonging" within the broader, shifting political contexts of higher education in the U.S. because students are seeking "belonging" within specific institutional structures :
However, especially in popular discourse, the terms [belonging and sense of belonging] also tend to elide any direct mention of race, structural inequities, digital disenfranchisement, sector underfunding or any of the various stressors and changes in higher education.
Reviewing literatures within the broader field of education, within digital pedagogies, and within placed- based education, Stewart and Le argue for moving beyond study of students' individual emotional sense of connection and acceptance to also study their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination, since "belonging" is inherently about the power of others to include or exclude:
Efforts to cultivate belonging – in any learning modality – require deliberate engagement with learners’ experiences and with the power relations to which they are subject.
The authors also call for readers to recognize that students may well refuse"belonging" as an act of agency, as they refuse membership in groups and settings that deny their identity and worth.
Why, they ask, would students seek to uncritically "belong" within social structures that replicate inequalities that have worked against them and their communities:
Schools and institutions nonetheless reflect and often replicate societal power structures and logics of dominance to the detriment of SoB [Sense of Belonging], particularly for students whose lived experiences of the learning environment are navigated via marginalized embodiments and identity roles within those power structures.
Most first-generation students are navigating colleges at the intersections of class, race, gender, sexuality, and/or disability. In many places now, they have less access than ever to the analytical tools that might enable them to better understand any of these dimensions of their lived experiences. In many places, staff for personal support are stretched to their limits. In most places, faculty are exhausted.
I'm all for extracurriculars, leadership development, and meaningful connections to faculty and staff. I'm also all for listening very closely to students about the barriers they have always experienced within these social interactions, and how those barriers may now be intensifying.
I'm also all for learning much more about how student leaders, staff, and faculty are learning to question their own assumptions of entitlement and power now that first-generation students are seeking their rightful places on campus. Stewart and Le's paper is a very good reminder that the power inherent in many campus actors' ease and sense of ownership is central to whether others will ever sense that they, too, "belong".
