Deconstructing School Belonging: The Nuanced Relationships Between Belonging, Academic Achievement, and Socioeconomic Status

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17: Equity, Belonging, and Identity: Unpacking the Forces Shaping Educational Outcomes

Abstract

Largely propelled by the poor student mental health that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic, schools in Ontario, Canada have shifted their policies from a purely academic, traditional focus to ones that also prioritize school belonging, student well-being and pedagogical approaches like Social-Emotional Learning (SEL). For example, the 2020 Ontario Mathematics Curriculum devotes one of their five main policy tenets toward developing and applying the SEL skills of students to support emotional intelligence, be culturally relevant, and to increase the transferability of mathematical processes. Despite these efforts to prioritize school belonging, Ontario students still report worrying rates of overall school experiences that only decline as grade level increases. To understand this gap between policy and practice, the present paper is a literature review, informed by sociological theories of education and critical policy sociology, of stratification in school belonging and experiences of students. School belonging is a nuanced topic that necessitates the inspection of additional identity and demographic characteristics of students; Previous research has shown that students from low socioeconomic statuses are susceptible to poorer academic achievement in comparison to their peers of higher SES. Extending this theory of academic achievement gaps by SES, this paper aims to understand the complex relationships between school belonging, SES, and academic achievement. To do so, this review is guided by the following research questions: (1) Which students report the lowest levels of belonging?; (2) Are levels of belonging related to academic achievement?; (3) Are schools and academic institutions tailored to certain students more than others? This paper concludes by sharing possible methodological approaches for furthering this research and applying it to the Ontario, Canada context, and by arguing that students from low SES backgrounds are disproportionately disadvantaged in their schooling experiences by way of both academic achievement and belonging.

Author

• Sophia Mathies, University of Toronto