Conference Agenda

Sense of belonging benefits children of all ages as it gives them emotional security, boosts relationships with others, shapes their identity and agency (Halse, 2018). Over the past decades, a growing body of literature has focused on what it means for students to have a sense of school belonging and how this relates to academic outcomes and well-being. Although children’s learning and wellbeing is often the central focus of these claims, little is known about young children’s own perspectives and understanding of the concept of belonging. Also, literature on the experiences of different ethnic minoritized groups and how they feel like they belong or don't belong in school is scarce and mainly focuses on how schools foster a sense of belonging (DeNicolo et al., 2017; Di Stefano, 2017) and not on how the children experience it.

Studies have found that minoritized children’s sense of belonging is at risk in mainstream school and that monolingual bias and assimilationist practices significantly affect the feelings of belonging of ethnic minority youth in mainstream schools (Van Der Wildt et al., 2017). Next to these mainstream schools a large part of minoritized pupils attend supplementary schools, which are organized by volunteers in the weekend ( 45% in Flanders see Coudenys et al, under review). In these schools the pupils usually learn their heritage tongue, get acquainted with cultural traditions and meet up with peers (Burman & Miles, 2018; Creese & Martin, 2006). Within the supplementary school the mainstream narratives are displaced, and pupils’ heritage language is central to the pedagogical project (Simon, 2018) . Simultaneously, in these surroundings all their classmates share a migration background and initial research has shown that such schools can foster a sense of belonging when mainstream schools cannot (Kayama & Yamakawa, 2020). Therefore, supplementary schools are interesting spaces to dissect how minoritized children experience sense of belonging in both their mainstream and supplementary school context.

In this study, we examine how children conceptualize and articulate their sense of belonging from their own viewpoints. We aim to identify the contextual and layered experiences of belonging of children attending both mainstream and supplementary education. We interview primary schoolchildren in their supplementary school. We selected two cases: A Russian language heritage school and an Arabic school in the superdiverse setting of the city of Antwerp, in Flanders. Flanders has a strong monolingual tendency in its mainstream schools (Agirdag, 2010; Pulinx et al., 2017) whereas in the supplementary schools bilingualism is encouraged and heritage language is nurtured. The Russian and Arabic language school were chosen because they both welcome pupils from varying background, which makes them interesting to study sense of belonging against a background of ethnic diversity and linguistic diversity.

The research question we hope to answer is:

How do minoritized pupils conceptualize sense of belonging against their experiences of attending both supplementary and mainstream schooling in Flanders?

We move away from static and essentialist ideas of belonging and define belonging as dynamic and highly contextualized. This means that students experience belonging in diverse ways and that these experiences may vary from place to place (e.g., in the mainstream school and the supplementary school), depending on interactions between teachers and students, participation in certain activities and linguistic and cultural policies and practices. The purpose of this study is to understand the contextual and layered experiences of belonging of minoritized children attending both mainstream and supplementary education in Europe, in which these topics to a large extent remain underresearched. These findings can give us insight in how children construct belonging which can impact future policies aimed at enhancing sense of belonging for all children.

Despite the well-known positive effect of students’ sense of school belonging for various educational outcomes, empirical research exploring the sources of school belonging is still sparse. Particularly, the question of how education system characteristics might contribute to immigrant-nonimmigrant student differences in their sense of school belonging remains unexplored. Since students' sense of school belonging is shaped by their experiences at school, we assume that the education system characteristics significantly impact their sense of belonging (c.p. Allen & Kern, 2017: 54ff.). This study focuses on a central feature of education systems: between-school tracking (shortly: tracking; e.g. Allmendinger 1989: 233). Specifically, we ask whether tracking, i.e. the grouping of students into different types of secondary schools according to ability (e.g. Betts 2012), affects ethnic inequality in school belonging.

School belonging has been defined as “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenow and Grady 1993, p. 80). It has been found to positively affect students’ educational outcomes by increasing their academic motivation, reducing the risk of school absenteeism, and enforcing more positive academic self-efficacy (Allen et al., 2018).

Previous studies suggest that immigrant students often tend to have a lower sense of school belonging than nonimmigrant students (Allen et al., 2021; Chiu et al., 2012; Chiu et al., 2016; Ham et al., 2017). In contrast, other studies find no differences between minority and majority students (Ma, 2003) or even a higher sense of belonging among minority students (De Bortoli, 2018; Pong & Zeiser, 2012).

We hypothesize that education system characteristics, i.e. tracking, may explain these mixed findings. Due to social differences in scholastic achievement (i.e., primary effects, Boudon, 1974), the sorting process in tracked education systems is expected to lead to more pronounced school segregation of immigrants and a higher proportion of immigrant students in the lower educational tracks. School segregation as a result of tracking may have different - and at times counteracting - effects on the sense of school belonging of immigrant students.
Higher-track students benefit from the prestige of their school, resulting in a positive attitude towards school and a stronger sense of belonging (the "basking in reflected glory effect". Cialdini et al., 1976). By contrast, lower-track students may perceive school as a source of failure and low status, causing them to oppose it (stigmatization, e.g., Van Houtte, 2006). Since immigrant students are more likely to attend lower tracks, the stigma of the lower track would cause a lower feeling of school belonging among immigrant students as compared to nonimmigrant students. Thus, tracking would lead to higher inequality in school belonging.
In contrast to the effects of stigmatization, the homophily principle (McPherson et al., 2001) suggests that school homogeneity in ethnicity could also positively affect the sense of school belonging. According to the homophily principle, relationships between similar people regarding various social characteristics are more likely to occur, and peer relationships in turn are a key factor in the sense of school belonging (Allen et al., 2018). This effect applies to immigrant and non-immigrant students. However, the often higher educational aspirations of immigrant students could result in a more positive attitudinal climate and higher levels of school belonging in schools with a higher share of immigrant students.
Together, tracking might have counteracting effects on the inequality in students’ sense of school belonging between immigrant and nonimmigrant students. It thus remains an empirical question which of these counteracting effects has more weight in determining inequality in the sense of school belonging.

As a Nordic welfare state Finland shares a collective self-image as forerunners of equality, democracy, and social justice. Education is seen as a key instrument for social justice, and education policies in Finland still largely reflect this principle, also concerning the highest level of education, the academia. Historically, Finnish academic education has distinctively been a national project, aimed at educating Finnish citizens to work as professionals in the national labour market and promoting development of the welfare state (Buchardt, Markkola & Valtonen 2013). State-funded university education has been seen as an instrument for promoting social mobility and overcoming class conflict (Lund 2020; Kaarninen 2013). Still, as the Finnish Higher Education system is one of the most competitive in the OECD countries (OECE 2019) it can be regarded as a site of privilege. Admission to university is based on grades in matriculation exams and/or entrance exams. In a formally meritocratic admission system, there are groups that are statistically under-represented, such as students with migrant (FINEEC 2019) or working-class backgrounds (Nori 2011) or disabilities (Nurmi-Koikkalainen 2017). In addition, national education statistics do not provide figures on students of colour or oppressed national minorities (e.g., Finnish Roma). As these groups enter university, they share positions that are marked by differences in relation to normative expectations and structures that tend to prioritise whiteness, able-bodiedness, and middle-classness. Their lived realities and experiences in academia have been theorised as the examples of subjection to institutional violence or misrecognition (Burke 2018), which refers to processes of treating particular groups of students as “out of place”, potentially causing encounters that are disruptive, require negotiation, and invite complicity (Puwar 2004; Mirza 2018).

The aim of our study in progress is to analyse how normative whiteness is established and reproduced in Finnish university education. Within the tradition of Critical race and whiteness studies, it has been emphasised that the analyses of racialisation should not only be targeted to the processes of racial othering and exploitation, but also to the locus of hegemonic power and privileged positions in society (Keskinen et al. 2017). Our study conceptualises whiteness as a normativity that often acts invisibly but constantly operates as a racialised touchstone for belonging in Finnish universities. Whiteness is understood here as a hegemonic power structure and a set of norms against which ‘others’ are defined. (Keskinen & Andreassen 2017). This means that whiteness is approached as a structural position of privileges that is produced and reproduced through racialising practises that take place in various encounters, procedures, conventions, routines, and meaning-making processes, both in official and informal space in the university. Racialising practices do not necessarily manifest as explicit exclusion but as taken-of-granted expectations of the adequate student and ways of being, easily experienced as inadequacy and not belonging by those who do not effortlessly meet these expectations.