Belonging

Belonging is a psychological concept, defined as a feeling of connectedness or a feeling that one is cared for by others. Belonging is one of three basic psychological needs that are essential to human growth and development. It involves the need to feel securely connected with others in the environment and to experience oneself as worthy of love and respect. In an organizational setting, the feeling of belonging or relatedness can be defined as a sense of community.

Current research tells us that belonging is important in understanding student (and adult) behavior and performance. The need to belong is a fundamental human motivation that is associated with differences in cognitive processing, emotional patterns, behavior, health, and well-being. Being accepted leads to positive emotions and prosocial behaviors, while rejection or exclusion may lead to negative feelings like anxiety, depression, and loneliness and antisocial behaviors. Being part of a supportive network reduces stress, while the absence of supportive relationships is associated with a wide range of psychological and behavioral problems, including drug use and violence toward self and others.

In education, the sense of belonging is related to conditions that directly or indirectly affect student retention and learning. Students who experience a sense of belonging in their school and classrooms have a stronger supply of inner resources. They perceive themselves to be more competent and autonomous and have higher levels of intrinsic motivation. They have more positive attitudes toward school, class work, teachers, and peers and tend to be more engaged. They have a strong sense of their own social competence and interact with peers and adults in positive and supportive ways. Conversely, the experience of rejection is consistently associated with behavioral and social problems in the classroom, lower interest and involvement in school, lower achievement, and dropout.

Problematic is the fact that many students do not experience schools as caring communities. In general, students become increasingly alienated from school as they progress from elementary through secondary grades, a phenomenon that some attribute to the increasingly impersonal environment that students encounter at the secondary level. Particularly likely to be affected are minority students, students in urban low-income settings, and boys.

Directly contributing to students' sense of belonging is frequent positive and supportive interaction. Teachers play a particularly strong role in affecting students' sense of community; peer support is also important. Through high expectations, personal and academic concern, encouragement and support, respect and fair treatment, teachers convey caring to their students. In addition, organizational arrangements that promote (or discourage) supportive interaction among teachers and peers can affect students' sense of belonging. Organizational options that increase the amount of time that teachers and students spend with one another and thereby permit the development of supportive relationships include smaller schools, block scheduling, interage and heterogeneous grouping, teaming, looping, and cooperative learning. Conversely, tracking, departmentalization, and didactic instruction are design features associated with depersonalization.