Feeling at home in school: Migrant youths’ narratives on school belonging in Flemish secondary education

Abstract

In Flanders, students with a migration background are highly overrepresented in the lower-status vocational and technical tracks, experience more grade retention and school and track mobility and have a higher risk of leaving school early than their native peers. The authors aim to shed light on the complexity of school belonging and its significance in these young people’s pursuit of a diploma. The analysis focuses on the lived experiences of three young individuals and reconstructs their trajectories from their point of view to illuminate their perceptions on school belonging while they (tried to) navigate their way through secondary education. Their narratives reveal how a sense of school belonging is crucial yet difficult to find. Experiences of exclusion and struggles to claim specific educational spaces as places where they ‘belong’ often result in feelings of being an outsider rather than a valued member of the school community. The journeys through secondary education are mostly recounted as trying to find a ‘ good school’ where they could ‘ fit in’.

Migrant Students’ Sense of Belonging and the Covid‐19 Pandemic: Implications for Educational Inclusion

“…School belonging has been established in the literature as a positive predictor of educational achievement, academic self-efficacy and attitudes (Fong Lam et al, 2015;Niehaus et al, 2012), andwellbeing (Kia-Keating &Ellis, 2007;Nuttman-Shwartz, 2019;Scharpf et al, 2020). Previous research has shown that positive peer relationships, connectedness with friends (Allen et al, 2018;Ambrose, 2020;Delgado et al, 2016;DeNicolo et al, 2017;Van Caudenberg et al, 2020), and parental support at home (Allen et al, 2018;Hu & Wu, 2020) are linked to increased feelings of school belonging. Research has also found that school belonging forms a protective factor against the development of mental health problems (Kia-Keating & Ellis, 2007;Nuttman-Shwartz, 2019;Scharpf et al, 2020).…”

“…School belonging is often a complex experience for migrant students whereby personal emotions and formal representations and norms of belonging interact with and conflict with each other (e.g., Ambrose, 2020;Gao et al, 2019;Puroila et al, 2021;Souto-Manning, 2021;Van Caudenberg et al, 2020;Yuval-Davis, 2004). DeNicolo et al ( 2017) identify the quality of teacher-student and peer relationships, as well as migrant students' agency, as key components in creating a positive sense of belonging for migrant students.…”

“…Secondly, how migrants actively construct and forge new places and definitions for belonging highlight their resilience and agency (Gao et al, 2019;Moberg Stephenson & Källström, 2020;Van Caudenberg et al, 2020). For example, children can adopt multiple identifications and points of belonging (Devine, 2009;Rutland et al, 2012), contradicting narrow definitions that usually surround them in society and education (e.g., "migrant" or "language learner"; Gao et al, 2019).…”

“…In schools, a crucial component of fostering inclusion is building a community to which students feel they belong (Booth & Ainscow, 2002;Kovač & Vaala, 2021;Shaw et al, 2021). However, several issues still exist that may jeopardise migrant students' inclusion and school belonging (e.g., Abu El-Haj & Skilton, 2017;Souto-Manning, 2021;Van Caudenberg et al, 2020). Such challenges are, among others, placing migrant students in separated newcomer or language classes that might lead many students to lower educational pathways and limited learning opportunities (Emery et al, 2021), schools' monolingual policies and teaching norms (Gogolin, 2021), school practitioners' challenges in teaching migrant and refugee children (Pastoor, 2015;Szelei et al, 2020), racialising and "othering" discourses (Ambrose, 2020;Souto-Manning, 2021;Szelei et al, 2021), and experiences of exclusion and victimisation in schools (D'hondt et al, 2015;Adams-Wiggins, 2020).…”

Belonging and Masculinities: Proposal of a Conceptual Framework to Study the Reasons behind the Gender Gap in Engineering

“…Nowadays, belonging is used as an analytical category in sociology, geography, anthropology, psychology, political science, history, and law to address topics such as citizenship, migration, and identity. It is particularly relevant to underline the work developed in the educational field through the use of this concept, asserting that "students who feel little or no connection to their school are more likely to suffer from a range of negative emotions and behavioural problems, tend to show lower school engagement and are more likely to be absent from school and to leave school early" [56] (p. 2). Other authors refer to 'modes of belonging', as an approach to apprehend the different attachment forms to places, groups, cultures, etc., [57].…”