Overview
Belonging is reflected in a student’s answer to the motivational question Do people notice and care if I’m here? It includes:
- A sense of connection to classroom partners (students and teachers), experienced as: trust, interest, encouragement, and safety to share different ideas
- A sense of being part of a discipline-based community, like a community of science learners or professionals
How to support belonging: Principles
- Support safe personal revelation
- Invite all student perspectives and validate student assets
- Allow students to express emotions; acknowledge and validate those emotions
- Dedicate time and resources to students (be available to students)
- Treat student questions and concerns seriously
- Treat students with respect and recognize that they have individual needs and lives outside of school that might create barriers for them in school
| In the classroom, these principles look... | |
|---|---|
| ...less like this | ...more like this |
| The teacher dismisses or ignores student experiences and questions. The teacher focuses on soliciting and evaluating student answers instead of encouraging authentic communication from students. | The teacher positively acknowledges student interests and questions and demonstrates empathy and caring about students’ personal and academic struggles. |
|
The teacher tends to encourage only certain students while ignoring or missing opportunities to include all student voices. The teacher devalues the assets students bring into the classroom from their diverse life experiences and perspectives (e.g., students are allowed to mock each other’s ideas or judge them as “weird,” “stupid,” etc). Students interact with each other around science in a competitive or antagonistic manner, and/or become pigeon-holed into certain class identities (e.g., the one who always gets called on, the one who always messes up, etc). |
The teacher actively creates structures and/or norms to ensure that all students participate and all feel comfortable sharing their thoughts in whole-class and small-group formats. The teacher reinforces students’ creativity, use of talk moves, student modeling, peer help-seeking, and other productive forms of collaboration that both support respectful listening and response behaviors for all student contributions, and promote a sense of belonging within a scientific community of learners. |
| Students passively receive science information from their teacher and lack opportunities to learn with peers, or learn about mutual interests and values of peers. | The teacher gives students opportunities to tailor science learning endeavors to their own values, and to connect and build relationships with each other around questions of mutual interest and value. |
- Provide ground rules and expectations for respectful classroom communication
- Model equality: Communicate that all experience is valuable and that the diversity of ideas and experiences are assets
- Create activities that help students get to know each other
- Respect student reluctance to collaborate, but offer support (isolation is not an option)
- Ask students to bring their personal culture and histories into class activities. Do not tolerate alienation, marginalization, or discrimination
- Give all students leadership opportunities, and show that you trust their abilities to lead
- Embrace shared goals with a teamwork mentality: my success is our success
| In the classroom, these principles look... | |
|---|---|
| ...less like this | ...more like this |
| The teacher dismisses or ignores student experiences and questions. The teacher focuses on soliciting and evaluating student answers instead of encouraging authentic communication from students. | The teacher positively acknowledges student interests and questions and demonstrates empathy and caring about students’ personal and academic struggles. |
|
The teacher tends to encourage only certain students while ignoring or missing opportunities to include all student voices. The teacher devalues the assets students bring into the classroom from their diverse life experiences and perspectives (e.g., students are allowed to mock each other’s ideas or judge them as “weird,” “stupid,” etc). Students interact with each other around science in a competitive or antagonistic manner, and/or become pigeon-holed into certain class identities (e.g., the one who always gets called on, the one who always messes up, etc). |
The teacher actively creates structures and/or norms to ensure that all students participate and all feel comfortable sharing their thoughts in whole-class and small-group formats. The teacher reinforces students’ creativity, use of talk moves, student modeling, peer help-seeking, and other productive forms of collaboration that both support respectful listening and response behaviors for all student contributions, and promote a sense of belonging within a scientific community of learners. |
| Students passively receive science information from their teacher and lack opportunities to learn with peers, or learn about mutual interests and values of peers. | The teacher gives students opportunities to tailor science learning endeavors to their own values, and to connect and build relationships with each other around questions of mutual interest and value. |
- Describe how you identify within the field and what you do to continue learning Encourage students to think about how their experience is similar or different
- Explain your attraction to the field, the origins of your interests, and what impacts your engagement in the field can make, and invite students to reflect on their own interest
- Identify people from diverse backgrounds across science (and time periods) to whom students might relate
- Invite students into science by communicating what learning opportunities are available in the community (events, museums, etc.)
| In the classroom, this principle looks... | |
|---|---|
| ...less like this | ...more like this |
| Class time is solely spent on what the curriculum entails, ignoring the importance of student identification with peers, the teacher, the class as a community, or within science. The teacher or lesson materials do not help students to make personal connections, or they impose a limited type of relevance/value that only some students can identify with. |
The teacher fosters a sense of membership in a community of science thinkers by providing opportunities for all students to share real-life experiences or wonderings as related to classroom activities. The teacher cultivates a broader sense of community in the classroom that promotes learning as a collective by encouraging students to relate to peers and the teacher. |
| The teacher alienates students by making assumptions about students’ prior instruction or lived experiences (e.g., referring exclusively to the prior-grade teacher at the same school when students may have moved from elsewhere, stereotyping student interests or values based on race/ethnicity or other identity characteristics). | The teacher collects information about students’ prior lived experience and prior instruction in order to explicitly build upon the varying background knowledge, personal and academic, that different students bring to the classroom. |
- Learn about students’ self-beliefs related to science, and encourage students to see that everyone has something to contribute because science needs diverse perspectives and identities (e.g., early seat belts and airbags were less effective for women because they were designed by male engineers with a crash test dummy that was the size of a typical male)
- Work to reduce stereotypes about who can "do" science, which may include:
- Increasing self-awareness of how you communicate with students (e.g. who you call on in class, what type of language you use to describe scientists, how you communicate your values about diversity in science)
- Drawing on diverse examples of scientists, and materials to use in class (e.g., include authors and printed class materials that represent diverse backgrounds; depict diversity in materials displayed around class)
- Evaluate the extent to which curricular materials and activities promote equity such that all students can feel they belong. Ask yourself “Are certain cultures or perspectives ignored or undermined?”
- Learn about and adopt culturally responsive methods (e.g., storytelling) that can facilitate students’ sense of belonging with peers, with their instructor, within science, and as a learning community
| In the classroom, this principle looks... | |
|---|---|
| ...less like this | ...more like this |
| The teacher consistently recognizes the work and ideas of only a few students such that other students assume that they do not belong in science. The teacher may bestow recognition on a discernible category or type of student (e.g., mostly students of one gender, one race/ethnicity, one curriculum track) or ask only some students about their science-related goals and aspirations, implicitly suggesting that only certain kinds of students can find success in science. | The teacher promotes the development of a science identity for all students by explicitly teaching and drawing attention to the scientific skills that students are developing, and by recognizing the learning products of students from a variety of backgrounds, abilities, and/or demographic characteristics. The teacher encourages students to think about and share their aspirations in science (short- or long-term). |
| The teacher uses normative language (e.g., consistently referring to scientists with male pronouns) or overlooks opportunities to publicly acknowledge the contributions of scientists and engineers from diverse backgrounds. The teacher speaks uncritically about the universal objectivity of science as an enterprise without considering the varied relationships that students from different backgrounds may have with science. | The teacher actively incorporates inclusive classroom discourse and learning materials (e.g., non-normative language, assigning readings about or displaying posters of scientists from diverse backgrounds). Where applicable, the teacher addresses inequities in access, representation, or attribution in scientific work (e.g., exploitation of African Americans for scientific research, overlooking the contributions of female scientists). |
