Sense of belonging

The present study estimated the influence of academic and social collegiate experiences on Latino students' sense of belonging, controlling for background differences , using hierarchical analysis techniques with a nested design. In addition, results were compared between Latino students and their White counterparts. Findings reveal that grades, time spent studying, and interactions with diverse peers affect sense of belonging, accounting for approximately 11% of Latino students' belonging. Differences were found between Latino and White students. Important implications are discussed.

Resumen: El presente estudio estimó la influencia de experiencias sociales y académicas en el sentido de pertenencia de estudiantes latinas/os; se controlaron las diferencias étni-cas, usando técnicas de análisis jerárquico con un diseño de nido. Además los resultados se compararon entre estudiantes latinas/os con su contraparte de estudiantes blancos. Los hallazgos revelan que las calificaciones, el tiempo usado en estudiar, y las relaciones con compañeros diversos afectan el sentido de pertenencia; lo cual representó aproxima-damente 11% del sentido de pertenencia de los estudiantes latinas/os. Se encontraron diferencias entre estudiantes blancos y latinas/os. Se discuten implicaciones importantes.

School vision and mission statements are an explicit indication of a school's priorities. Research has found academic motivation, mental health promotion, and school belonging to be the most frequently cited themes in these statements. The present study sought to examine whether these themes relate to student academic achievement, as indicated by National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) scores. A stratified sample of 287 secondary schools in Victoria, Australia was analysed using two language analytic approaches: qualitative emergent coding and supervised lexical analysis. The highest academic scores occurred when mental health promotion was included, though results depended to some extent on the analytic approach and the level of aggregation. Results do suggest that explicitly prioritising both academic performance and mental health is beneficial. Further, the study provides an approach for using language analysis to investigate multilevel constructs in schools.

Youth experiencing discomfort in educational settings find it difficult to engage, often finding themselves at risk for academic failure. The current study examined, through consensual qualitative research (CQR; Hill, 2012), the student’s perspective on their own educational needs; concluding humanistic counseling and educational tenets are strongly desired by youth at-risk.

I am almost confident that most of you would not open the door to a Syrian refugee if you have the slightest doubt that this person could harm you in any way. I am also confident that this doubt and fear could be explained and dissolved and that inclusion could triumph.
In this paper, I posit that the similarity-attraction hypothesis, the integrated threat theory(ITT), the contact hypothesis, the common in-group identity model, and the mutual identity differentiation model could clarify some of the factors that are at stake when it comes to the inclusion and the integration of the Syrian refugees in host societies.

This study examined same-sex attracted (SSA) students' perceptions of their school climate toward same-sex attraction and their school-based environmental stresses and supports using Margaret Spencer's Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory model. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the relationship between stressors, coping mechanisms, and academic identity formation. Students' connection to teachers and their school environment had the strongest total impact on their academic self-concept and motivation to learn. Of key import was the indirect impact of students' perceptions of their school climate on both of these important academic outcomes, through their connection to both their school community and general school environment. Findings highlight the deleterious impact of school-based risk factors, including victimization and curricular silences, on educational outcomes for SSA youth.

This study explored the psychometric properties of a survey designed to measure the construct of belongingness based on a pilot administration of a new instrument. This exploration used Rasch measurement theory to determine the degree to which the instrument could be used to examine this construct within the context of language learning and instruction, and to inform revisions to the instrument prior to its use in future research. Pilot data for the new survey were collected from 249 undergraduate students enrolled at four universities in the Southeastern United States and displayed overall good fit to the Rasch model. Overall, the results suggested that the students reported complex perceptions of their own belonging, indicating neither isolation nor a close community in learning French. Students reported a general lack of pride or shame with complex disclosure patterns. Implications for theory, research, and practice suggest a need for further exploration of the various aspects of sense of belongingness, for the active cultivation of community, as well as for advocacy work.

Please note that this is the original unpublished version which has now been peer reviewed and published (see 'Making Sense of a Sense of Place' above). The review process required some significant editing changes be made to this original version.

The term ‘sense of place’ has become a ubiquitous piece of phraseology in contemporary Western culture; however its meanings are as diverse as its use is common. The primary aim of this paper is to clarify more precisely what the term ‘sense of place’ actually means, in response to the driving thesis that its present multifarious use renders the term so amorphous in meaning, that its power of meaning is lost. To corroborate this supposition, examples of the term’s multiple uses are portrayed, including its conflation with the related terms ‘spirit of place’ and genius loci. The Roman term genius loci is identified as the root from which both the terms ‘spirit of place’ and ‘sense of place’ stem, and in order to untangle their conflated use, the interrelated history of all three terms are mapped from their respective points of inception to present day. Having established this etymological and historical foundation, the importance of being linguistically precise in our use of the term ‘sense of place’ is argued within light of the added theses that, a) fostering the subjective reality of sense of place is essential to individual and social welfare, and b) that using the term more exactly is a necessary prerequisite to its being taken seriously enough to be incorporated into Western systems of governance and social policy. Finally, distinct definitions for each of the different terms are suggested and briefly discussed.

This presentation, delivered on 29th June 2021 for the Communities of Practice Transition Group, is from my MA Dissertation “Somewhere they belong: Understanding the impact and influence on UK Undergraduate Students’ Transitions, Identities, Sense of Belonging and Communities within a diverse and changing Higher Education sector.”

This literature review, through story telling of fictional cases, explored the theories and practice of transition, identities, sense of belonging and communities, and how all of these together can influence the students’ journey throughout University. Today’s presentation will be sharing one of the four persona’s from the Dissertation and highlighting in practice how these four factors can influence the student’s progression.

Mohamed Salmawy is an Egyptian prolific writer and president of the Egyptian Writers' Union.  His novel, Wings of the Butterfly was published shortly before the Egyptian Revolution began.  It is considered one of the rare novels that foresee the Revolution of the 25th of January. Salmawy’s aspiration towards revolution arises not in empty space, but in the very thick atmosphere of the current reality. In Wings of the Butterfly, Salmawy’s protagonists are the youth who are protesting against an authority they are estranged from. They express their rejection of their current reality with its gloominess, tyranny and oppression; looking forward to achieve their dream of freedom and dignity. Although Wings of the Butterfly is considered a critique of the current political and social climate, it is an expression of hope for sociopolitical change.  It is a utopian aspiration which cannot be fully realized or presented; a yearning towards a better way of life.

A meta-analysis of 35 studies found that social class (socioeconomic status) is related to social integration among students in higher education: Working-class students are less integrated than middle-class students. This relation generalized across students’ gender and year of study, as well as type of social class measure (parental education and parental income). However, type of social integration measure was a significant moderator. In particular, the social subscale of the Student Adaptation to College Questionnaire obtained the largest effect (r = .18, p < .001). Significant effects were also found using measures of the sense of belonging and participation in formal and informal social activities. Future research in this area should use multidimensional measures of social integration and investigate potential mediators of the social class-social integration relation.

One of the central interests of sociology is the relationship between self and society, and in particular how social change affects individuality, constraining or liberating the selves that we can be. This article proposes that because a sense of belonging plays a central role in connecting the person to the social, it can act as a window into studying the relationship between social change and the self. Furthermore, belonging offers a complex person-centred and dynamic approach that avoids reifying social structures, but rather depicts them as actively lived. A focus on belonging thus allows a dynamic examination of the mutual influence between self and society, and of how everyday practices are both regulated and creative, and hence generative of social change.

For the last 50 years, researchers have explored differential STEM major declaration and persistence rates among groups in college. Little is known about the specific mechanisms through which social networks affect persistence in STEM majors. Based on surveys with 2,000+ engineering and nearly 500 LGBTQIA+ STEM undergraduates, as well as 80+ interviews, we found that students' social networks were key in their declaration and persistence in STEM by helping students feel they fit in STEM. Specifically, parents provided emotional support wherein their children felt encouraged that they would be able to succeed in their difficult majors. Parents and teachers provided advice to women and underrepresented students in which they warned students that they would experience discrimination in their programs, and when they did experience this, the advice students received helped them cope. Underrepresented students who participated in race/ethnicity-focused professional engineering organizations (e.g. National Society of Black Engineers) saw engineers like themselves and were more likely to persist in their engineering degree programs than underrepresented students who did not participate in these organizations. Looking across their undergraduate career, the effects of social networks were most profound on the persistence of Black students in engineering. In addition, LGBTQIA+ students actively carved out social networks that would be affirming of their identities, particularly their gender minority identities (i.e. transgender), which helped them persist. In sum, this research highlights how the advice from individuals in their social networks helps students persist, specifically by improving their feelings of belonging in STEM. Implications for research and structural practice at K-16 are shared.

As the population increases, the amount of different people and different cultures also expands. With that comes major problems, one of which is our strong and inevitable need for a sense of belonging to a group of people. As social beings who depend on a sense of common values and beliefs, and seek commonality, the feeling that we belong is very important. The aim of this paper is to reflect on how games can increase our sense of belonging through the human-centered design of mechanics and games. The method used to do so will be a survey conducted with people from different backgrounds and nationalities, which explores the factors that make us feel that we belong. As a result of the survey, a list of things that increase our feeling of belonging was introduced, such as coming from different cultures, yet being supported and not judged, understanding each other's jokes, or having similar interests. The sense of belonging of the participants was also measured when they've lived in countries different from their own. The survey's results allow us to pick out things that revolve around that feeling and to design game mechanics that empower the feeling of belonging between groups of people. This paper's aim is to define such mechanics and to contribute to the impact of games on feelings of belonging. It also contributes to the debates on whether games should be recognized as a source of social support, especially since video games have grown out to be a popular medium, which connects people from all around the world and provides them the opportunity to foster connections and build skills.

Background
Since the late 1960s, research has demonstrated repeatedly that students in lower tracks achieve less, as they develop an anti-school culture to overcome the status deprivation resulting from being in a lower track. In quantitative large-scale research this anti-school culture is usually assessed using poor academic attitudes or study disengagement, because anti-school norms disengage students from the learning process. The extent to which students in different tracks feel embedded in their school communities, their sense of school belonging, has rarely been examined, although academic engagement and sense of belonging are related to each other and to achievement.

Objective
This article examines students’ sense of belonging in secondary schools offering different tracks and the role played by the faculty’s trust in the students.

Participants
The study is based on data from 3,475 students and 754 teachers in 28 technical/vocational schools and 3,376 students and 461 teachers in 22 academic schools in Flanders—that is the Northern, Dutch-speaking part from Belgium.

Research design
Use is made of (stepwise) multilevel analyses (HLM6).

Results
The analyses show that students in technical/vocational schools have a significant lower sense of belonging than students in academic schools. This association disappears if we take into account faculty trust in students. The association between school type and perceived teacher support, a subdimension of the sense of belonging, is not mediated by faculty trust, but is due to the lower GPA of students in technical/vocational schools.

Conclusions
The results indicate that teachers play a crucial role in the divergent nature of students’ social integration across different types of schools. In terms of strengthening students’ connectedness to a technical/vocational school environment, our results indicate that strengthening teachers’ level of trust in students could be crucial.

The widespread reuse of church buildings marks one of the major changes in the visible presence of religion in the Netherlands. The estimated rate by which church buildings are closing down in this country varies between two to as much as four churches a week. 1 Some are demolished, but most of these buildings are preserved and converted for such uses as flats, theatres or restaurants (among many other purposes) or they are acquired by other religious groups, regularly Christian communities with a migration background and occasionally Muslims. These transformation processes evoke vivid public debates about proper and improper ways of reusing church buildings and about how to best safeguard this Christian material culture, now commonly framed as 'cultural heritage'. These developments guided my decision to focus on the abandonment and repurposing of church buildings when I started my postdoctoral research in the HERA project Iconic Religion in 2014. This project, a cooperation between the universities of Bochum,

As a term, transnational attributes to an understanding of the world which challenges the borders of nation, gender, culture, race; according to Silvia Schultermandl. Identity shouldn't be seen so stiff that it can't fit in within the nation-state borders. Rather especially with immigration and as generations pass it becomes more of a collection of encounters. This unstable identity can be called a "hybrid identity." The mobility, the transnational people go through robs them of the feeling of a sense of belonging. They are always in a "neither-nor" situation. As characters we read, we see them struggling to find their place in the world and explore their "self" in the meantime. I will try to focus on some of the symbols and elements which reflect such or similar situations.

The Belonging Project is a longitudinal learning and teaching research project seeking to develop and define a new approach to enhancing student engagement and graduate outcomes in the School of Media and Communications RMIT University. The project, bound by the theoretical concept of belonging, grew from collaborative work undertaken within the School to develop and document a common pedagogical approach and create a unified learning and teaching narrative. Importantly, the project was aligned with the whole of undergraduate degree structure in order to achieve findings with transferability to other schools and higher education institutions.

The project sits within the context of the continually evolving nature of the higher education sector which presents numerous practical opportunities and challenges, not least of which is the changing role of higher education in civil society more broadly. Contemporary universities are both educational institution and broker between diverse stakeholders with complex and, at times, competing interests: secondary institutions, students who increasingly exercise their authority as knowledge consumers,and industries.

This chapter shows how upward social mobility is possible for those who want to remain relatively geographically immobile with a strong attachment to place, despite this seeming at odds with a 21 st century reflexive individualism. In using narratives from families living in Wigan, North West England, stories of place, class and gender contextualise social mobility over three generations of 'ordinary' families' lives showing how belonging in place and social mobility are not necessarily mutually exclusive ways of being in the modern world.

This article accounts for the allure of sports spectatorship in late capitalism by theorizing spectatorial communities as imagined communities. Building on the work of Benedict Anderson and others, and drawing on discourse around fandom in popular culture and the media, it argues that imagined communities of fandom function as sites of meaning and community within the alienating and individualist context of late capitalism. These communities are invented and continuously rehearsed through fetish spectacle and ritualistic practice and produce Manichean understandings of social relations that can lead to marginalization and violence.

Contemporary Asian Australian poets have recently begun to attract more attention, particularly with the publication of the anthology, edited by Adam Aitken, Kim Cheng Boey and Michelle Cahill, Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. This essay engages with three of these poets: Debbie Lim, Shen and James Stuart, and reads their poems through a diasporic lens. Contrary to scholarship that investigates belonging using the more orthodox ideas of home and land, this reading engages with fluidity and mobility through the depictions of water to better represent the diasporic experience. Further, these poems employ desire and the desiring subject to engage with the way diasporic belonging is figured as contested and contingent. Each of these elements will be explored in the poems in order to investigate the link between diasporic belonging and depictions of water.

Abstract: A sense of belonging stimulates motivation and
investment in group goals and thus is extremely important
for productive communities. In this chapter, we look at
two research articles discussing the impact of exclusion,
or thwarted belonging, and draw parallels with classroom
life. The main finding is that when one isexcluded, they
can become even more anti-social and isolated in their
behavior. Suggestions are given for decreasing the chance
of initial social exclusion and for finding ways to alleviate
it once it may have occurred. Classroom group dynamics
especially benefit when teachers are aware of the signs of
social exclusion early on so that they can counter them with
inclusionary moves. Emotional belonging precedes learning,
not only for each individual but for all members in a group.
In other words, we contend that the group learns less when
some members have been excluded through bullying, self selected exclusion, or social loafing. The interaction and
energy necessary to include outliers may create good group
dynamics.

In the face of emergency situations, such as a global pandemic, individuals rely on their personal resources, but also on community dimensions, to deal with the unprecedented changes and risks and to safeguard their well-being. The present study specifically addresses the role of individual resources and community dimensions with reference to academic communities facing COVID-19-related lockdowns and the changes that these have implied. An online questionnaire was administered to 1124 Italian University students. It detected their sense of belonging and of responsible togetherness with reference to their academic community through community dimensions, their student self-efficacy as an individual resource, and their academic stress—potentially stemming from studying in the middle of a pandemic. A multiple mediation model was been run with structural equation modeling. The results show that both the community dimensions associate with higher student self-efficacy and the sense of res...

Compared to the rest of Indonesia, the emergence of a waria (transgender women) community in West Papua is recent. Since the 1970s, waria from other islands have moved to Papua, seeking better economic prospects. These circumstances, along with wider social change, have attracted indigenous Papuan waria to the community. Against the backdrop of the salon work and the exuberant nightlife that is typically part of their lives, waria can be regarded as agents of beauty in their milieu. The practices of beauty that waria embody and produce reflect the history of internal colonisation, the available imagined communities, and transnational beauty culture, all of which foster categories of belonging. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork in coastal Papua, with an emphasis on the waria beauty pageant, I demonstrate how, in response to social exclusion, waria strive for recognition by enacting strategies of belonging. In their beauty practices, waria aspire to belonging on the transnational and national scales in order to pursue communal belonging. The article underlines how the accomplishment of beauty in Papua is tied to the nation as much as to local aspirations for modernisation, which in turn positions indigenous Papuan waria under intersectional circumstances of gender and racialised ideals of beauty.

KEYWORDS: Waria, transgender, Indonesia, beauty, West Papua, national belonging, embodiment

Using a sample of 144 Native American undergraduates attending predominantly White universities in the United States, this study examined through multilevel regression analyses the influence of interactions with faculty and diverse peers on their sense of belonging in college. Interactions with others were positively related to sense of belonging, indicating that Native American students who engaged faculty in-class and diverse peers frequently and in varied ways felt a stronger sense of belonging in college than their same-race peers who engaged others less frequently or not at all. Grades in college also emerged as a significant predictor of Native American students’ sense of belonging. Implications for future policy and practice are highlighted, as well as recommendations for extending this important line of inquiry.

ABSTRACT:
This paper analyses, within a perspective of interactions connecting female memory, city and everyday events, the long feature film Aquarius (Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). The dwelling is the foundation to the conflicts of the protagonist Clara. The Casetti and Di Chio method (2007) was chosen as inspiration for the three levels in which the methodology of analysis regarding the film’s narrative will be approached. The analytical categories “city”, “collective space”, “old age women”, “habitational matters”, “memories” and “everyday events” reside at the core of this analysis. City and the female body are shuffled in the experiences of public spaces and the fear that crosses and limits the relationship between private and collective space.

Keywords: Aquarius. City. Gender. Affects. Everyday life. Sexuality. Symbolic violence.

RESUMO:
Este paper analisa, sob uma perspectiva de interações entre memória, cidade, corpo e cotidianidade feminina, o longa metragem Aquarius (Brasil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). O espaço do habitar alicerça a construção do protagonismo dos conflitos da personagem Clara. A metodologia de análise da narrativa fílmica foi desenvolvida em três níveis inspirados no método de Casetti e Di Chio (2007). As categorias " cidade " , " espaço coletivo " , " velhice feminina " , " questões habitacionais " , " memórias " e " cotidianidades " agregam o eixo central desta análise. A cidade e o feminino se embaralham na vivência do espaço público e do medo que atravessa e limita a relação entre o espaço privado e coletivo. Abstract This paper analyses, within a perspective of interactions connecting female memory, city and everyday events, the long feature film Aquarius (Brazil, Kleber Mendonça Filho, 146 min, 2016). The dwelling is the foundation to the conflicts of the protagonist Clara. The Casetti and Di Chio method (2007) was chosen as inspiration for the three levels in which the methodology of analysis regarding the film's narrative will be approached. The analytical categories " city " , " collective space " , " old age women " , " habitational matters " , " memories " and " everyday events " reside at the core of this analysis. City and the female body are shuffled in the experiences of public spaces and the fear that crosses and limits the relationship between private and collective space.

Building and sustaining students’ sense of belonging at school has been proposed by teachers and researchers as a means of stimulating students’ intent or desire to learn and of reducing student attrition. This article will present the results of an inquiry into the literature on
belonging to support the perspective that is it necessary, not only to foster a strong sense of belonging, but also to place much greater emphasis on school belonging in educational programs, practices, and research. The aims of the paper are: (a) to review the theoretical
literature on school belonging with an emphasis on its defining attributes and main determinants, (b) to review the measurement instruments of school belonging, and (c) to identify various strategies that may enhance school belonging. In light of the defining attributes identified, the authors propose six general recommendations for educational stakeholders
wishing to build and sustain students’ sense of belonging at school.

Horses, while not native to Australia, have survived and thrived on the continent alongside the white settlers who first brought them here, and have come to be associated with a certain image of Australianess. In particular, the rugged masculinity typified in A.B. Paterson’s 1895 poem “The Man from Snowy River”, about a nameless man who single-handedly captures a mob of wild bush horses (brumbies), has continued to influence representations of national identity. This paper investigates the dualistic role of the brumby, an animal that is simultaneously positioned as a heritage icon, and an environmental pest. Drawing on existing scholarship, including Laurajane Smith’s notion of an Authorised Heritage Discourse, I argue that the brumby functions as an avatar of belonging for white, Anglo-European settler Australians, and that the impassioned ‘brumby debate’ reveals a deep anxiey of belonging in a colonised landscape.

This study explored the moderating role of sense of belonging on the relations between racial microaggressions and depressive symptoms. Using survey data from students of Asian descent in the United States (N = 553) at a predominantly White university, we found that racial microaggressions and sense of belonging significantly predicted depressive symptoms. In addition, sense of belonging moderated the relations between racial microaggressions and depressive symptoms. Specifically, having a higher level of sense of belonging had a counter effect against the detrimental impact of racial microaggressions on the depressive symptoms. Implications for research and practice in higher education are discussed.