How Youth-Led Belonging Initiatives Are Transforming Urban Public School Environments Through Fashion, Media, and Architecture

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

This interactive youth-led forum moves beyond surface-level strategies for supporting students’ belonging by positioning Black and Brown youth as belonging subject-matter experts, and by providing vivid and textured youth-led examples of youth who are demanding their belonging. As the students in this session teach us, White supremacist structures can pervade even within predominantly Black school environments that students generally find affirming. These students also teach us how such structures can be disrupted through youth-led communal incubators that spark new movements and help actualize new realities. Guided by a psychological framework of belonging designed to address the experiences of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, the purpose of this interactive panel is to provide vivid, first-hand descriptions, and a synthesis of the ways Black and Brown students are demanding their belonging in predominantly Black schools characterized as urban emergent (Milner & Lomotey, 2021). Youth panelists in this session hail

from Durham, North Carolina—a city of approximately 250,000 residents, with about 39 percent identifying as Black.
Adolescents’ well-being, achievement beliefs, and academic performance can all be traced back to their belonging experiences in secondary school environments (Allen & Bowles, 2012; Brooms, 2019; Faircloth & Hamm, 2005; Juvonen, 2007; Martinez, 2019; Matthews et al., 2014; Sánchez et al., 2005)— which means that belonging is a developmental priority and a psychological necessity for students (Goodenow, 1993; Healey & Stroman, 2020).
Within the metanarrative of educational research, school belonging is often characterized as a passive process, in which academic institutions make students aware (via explicit messaging and/or hidden curricula) that their school environment is—or is not—the right place for them. However, one motivational principle that is often lost when applying the psychology of belonging to the study of students’ educational experiences is that addressing threats to one’s belonging and satisfying the need to belong can also be an active process (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). According to the Opportunities to Belong framework (Gray, Hope, & Matthews, 2018), educators can cultivate institutional opportunities to belong by providing students time and space to address educational barriers and inequitable schooling conditions that devalue marginalized students and derail their academic trajectories. Belonging is more than an interpersonal experience: It is also structural, and structures that do not serve students well can be challenged and dismantled.
Some school districts recognize that students’ belonging experiences should inform decision-making on school policies. But detailed examples and powerful illustrations of how such opportunities can be structured are not well-documented in publicly accessible
outlets. Recent quasi-experimental evidence suggests that implementing action projects into the formal K–12 curriculum can be effective for increasing school engagement among low- income students from marginalized identity groups (Voight & Velez, 2018). One problem, however, is that education decision-makers sometimes dismiss policy recommendations in students’ action projects (Bertrand, 2019), or fail to thoughtfully consider and reflect on the implications of their action projects (Bertrand, 2018). Youth in this session have identified strategies to rise above these common barriers, and are eager to share their insights on a national stage.
This session makes an important contribution to the overall Presidential theme by providing youth with a platform to teach AERA attendees about imagining educational

spaces free of racial injustice. Youth will share illustrative cases of lessons learned from using participatory methods in ongoing youth-led belonging initiatives. The first youth panel describes the importance of “next-level fashion” to make adults more aware of issues young people experience in their daily social encounters. The second youth panel highlights the critical role of media as a tool harnessed by youth to control the narrative and reputation of their school, while also teaching educators how to affirm them. The third youth panel highlights award-winning 3-D school models of future schools that the participants feel that youth deserve—incorporating such artifacts as infographics, agendas, conversation takeaways, and captioned photos of action project development.
This session will address the following questions for attendees: (1) How are students at urban public middle schools and high schools positioning themselves as thought leaders during all phases of their belonging advocacy work? and (2) How are education decision- makers legitimizing and responding to students’ contextualized and equity-focused perspectives on opportunities to belong?

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• DeLeon Gray, North Carolina State University

Participants

• Joanna N. Ali, North Carolina State University

• Kia Allah, North Carolina State University

• TaiSean Jones, North Carolina Central University

Discussant

• DeLeon Gray, North Carolina State University