Belonging

Any adult learning leader interested in building smarter and stronger readers, writers, and problem-solvers must first start with relationship building with their young learners. Part of relationship building depends on every young learner feeling like they belong to the learning process. Without a sense of belonging, learning becomes a sterile operation without hope for successful outcomes.

I ran across a 2023 article from the Othering and Belonging Institute at Cal Berkeley that applies design principles to the sense of belonging. In other words, how do you build belonging in human learners?

“Across our planet, people are looking for effective ways to build just, equitable, and inclusive institutions that serve and support everyone. Even more challenging, we’re looking for ways to do so without fueling the growing fragmentation that is separating us from each other and our sense of humanity.”

As an aside, it is questionable whether this article could even be written today, especially from an institute of higher education, when the terms “justice,” “equity,” and “inclusiveness” are used in the article’s first sentence. But I digress.

“The distinct belonging network developed by the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) includes a set of principles and practices that can root out structural inequality and exclusion of all kinds while helping us turn toward, rather than against, each other. Beyond a call for inclusion into pre-existing structures built to serve only some of us, belonging asks each of us to commit to co-creating new structures built for everyone.”

“This is no small task. But we believe that belonging is a rich, multi-pronged concept that is up to the challenge, in part, because it is emergent and evolving. It is not limited to being just a feeling, or a slogan, or a quick ‘to-do.’ Its robustness comes form its roots in a range of fields including sociology, neuroscience, psychology, law, and political science, but it draws equally from the wisdom and experiences of community-builders, artists, and storytellers.”

“Belonging is powerful because it works as an aspirational north star that helps us declare the kind of world and communities we want to live in – vibrant and interconnected healthy ones in which everyone holds the agency, responsibility, and power to co-create the structures that serve the good of the whole.”

“While the term belonging is used to mean many things, here at OBI we think of belonging as the antidote to othering – the denial of a person or groups humanity based on their identity, and the process of generating structural inequality found at every level of society. We also emphasize the role that structures play in either building or prohibiting belonging.”

“We developed this model of belonging because we know that if we continue to divide into smaller we’s, and prevent each other from fully contributing to the whole because of differences like religion or race, we simply will not survive as a species. Put simply – differences of all kinds should be celebrated, not turned into fictitious stories that sort people into hierarchies of value.”

“While we’ve done our best to create a set of principles that can work anywhere, we recognize that context and culture matter deeply. So whether you’re in Kansas City or Kyoto, Jacksonville or Johannesburg, or Boston or Buenos Aires, we invited you to be in conversation with these principles and to explore how you might adapt them for your part of the world. We look forward to learning how you made them work for you, and how your adaptations can help them work for everyone.”

…

“Belonging Design Principles At-a-Glance:

1. The root of the problem is othering.
2. Everyone belongs.
3. Prioritize structure change.
4. Recognize and address power dynamics.
5. Foster agency and inclusive co-creation.
6. Embrace mutual responsibility.
7. Celebrate and value diversity.
8. Recognize that identities are multifaceted and dynamic.
9. Prioritize and value relationships.
10. Harness the power of interconnection.”

…

One of the reasons many charter schools out-perform traditional schools is because high-performing charters work on building relationships (including belonging) before they even open an academic book. On the other hand, our traditional K-12 schools are so eager to prepare children to take tests, they forego the relationship work to the detriment of making all young learners feel a part of something bigger.

What if a learning organization started the journey with teaching everyone of their young learners the importance of belonging, and more importantly, the importance of making others feel the sense of belonging? How would our learners be different? How would our learning system be different? How would our world be different?

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB