Creating a Belonging Story
We really appreciate the set of reflection questions provided that can help instructors think about their own belonging stories. There are also alternatives for curating student and TA belonging stories.
A Belonging Story is a short story about a challenge that a person encountered in their academic or professional career and that made them worry about the extent to which they belonged, or fit in, in a particular context, and how they resolved or lessened that concern over time by using agentic strategies, like connecting with resources, to improve their experience.
When matriculating students have the opportunity to read, and reflect on, belonging stories attributed to upper-year college students, randomized-controlled field trials show that this can change their interpretation of early challenges in the transition to college, reducing academic outcomes gaps between racially minoritized and white students (Walton & Cohen, 2007; 2011), women and men in male-dominated engineering programs (Walton et al., 2015) and first- and continuing-generation students (Murphy et al., 2020; Yeager et al., 2016).
But it could be particularly impactful if instructors share their own belonging stories, or the belonging stories of past students, in their classes. In doing so, they provide students with a powerful framework for making sense of the common challenges that they are likely to face in rigorous academic environments. When students understand that belonging concerns are normal and not a signal that they do not belong or that they lack academic potential, students are more likely to stay engaged, seek help when they need it, and persist through academic challenges (Murdock-Perriera et al., 2019; Murphy et al., 2020).