How Understanding Language Use Can Inform Perceptions of School Belongingness

• In Event: Using Theories of Language and Power to Investigate Pressing Aspects of Education

Abstract

A sense of belongingness as a research construct has attracted inquiry from researchers, in particular psychologists, who argue that various contextual forms of belongingness are a fundamental part of people’s social lives (Walton & Cohen, 2007). If true, then it follows that the absence of positive social belonging experiences can hold negative implications for those who do not form and maintain lasting, positive, interpersonal relationships. Aligned with this year’s annual theme, this theoretical paper analyzes the role of language as a tool of power that demarcates bilingual students in various, often damaging ways relative to the dominant language of schools in the US and abroad. Specifically, the paper argues that the current power relations relative to language-minority students holds fundamental implications for the positionality of these students which, in turn, shapes their levels of perceived belongingness to the schooling context in which they reside.

The school context has been a crucial component for understanding “sense of belonging.” For Goodenow (1993), sense of belonging in schools encompasses the affective experiences of acceptance, respect, inclusion, and support. Furthermore, belongingness has been regarded as an important predictor of optimal learning (Connell & Wellborn, 1991). Taken together, the various inquiries on belongingness suggest that the affective experience of belonging may have a direct influence on student motivation: claiming that it increases students’ beliefs in success and academic achievement being possible. However, the roots of belongingness in schools, or its lack thereof, have long overlooked language as a source of power and a something that holds real implications for academic achievement. This theoretical and methodological paper uses Bourdieu’s notion of social capital (Bourdieu, 1986). For Bourdieu, the social world is a kind of accumulated history in which certain forms of capital are accrued, valued, and exchanged. People are not defined by social membership, but rather by the types of capital that are accrued and exchanged through social interactions in situated contexts.

This paper argues that bilingual students in the U.S. are stratified by language and school structures, and have differentiated access to certain forms of linguistic capital that in fact demarcates their positions relative to fluent speaking peers. In this view, as linguistic capital is accrued by formal relations between students and their field (the school, in this case), messages of inclusivity and exclusivity become pertinent. Following this, access to educational resources, knowledgeable others, etc. are not equally distributed. By drawing on Bourdieu’s theories of language as a form of cultural capital—and the formation and stratification of groups via language use—this paper highlights how its possible to unpack the parameters that validate language as a source of power which, in turn, makes possible a restructured way of informing a “sense of belonging” among language-minority students in schools. Hence, making visible how language is a form of cultural capital helps uncover how inequalities are produced which then increases focus on how sense of belonging is construed. This paper details such an argument and offers a roadmap for how to move forward.

Author

• Arnold E. Sánchez Ordaz, University of California - Santa Cruz