Reviving the Construct of “Mattering” in Pursuit of Equity and Justice in Higher Education: Illustrations from Mentoring and Partnership Programs
This is a great example of what you can learn when you listen to students. When students in pedagogical partnership (and mentoring) programs reflect on their experiences, what they describe is experiences of mattering. This chapter, co-authored by two students and two faculty members, explores what students say about experiences of partnership and offers recommendations for what faculty can do to foster academic belonging and mattering for students.
The construct of mattering was not one we set out to research. Instead, mattering is what we heard ‘new majority’ (Black, Indigenous, or Latinx) undergraduates who participated in student–student mentoring programs at LaGuardia Community College talk about in interviews conducted for the book Relationship-Rich Education (Felten & Lambert, 2020). It is also what we heard students from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) describe in the 15 years’ worth of feedback and interviews regarding their experiences in student–faculty pedagogical partnerships in the Students as Learners and Teachers (SaLT) program at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges (Cook-Sather, 2020). While we concurred with aspects of ‘belonging’ that scholars argue for in relation to student learning and experiences in higher education (Strayhorn, 2012; Thomas, 2012) and have used the construct to analyze students’ experiences (Cook-Sather & Felten, 2017b; Cook-Sather & Seay, 2021; Felten & Lambert, 2020), listening carefully to what the LaGuardia, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford students were saying led us to revisit the less commonly evoked construct of mattering – which is related to but distinct from belonging.