Belonging and School Policy?
A New York Times article this Sunday talks about Somali-Americans in Minneapolis choosing to go back to Somalia to fight for an Al Qaeda-affiliated group that is trying to overthrow the government in Somalia. One of their teachers talks about their reasons for joining as being a “crisis of belonging”. These young boys, who had come to the U.S. as teenagers or been born here to immigrant parents, felt disconnected from both their homeland and to their new country. Many of them had done well in school, gone on to college, but still felt they did not belong. Fighting for this group in their homeland gives them a feeling of purpose and belonging.
Belonging is important. Feeling that we have a place in the world, a meaningful place with others. I wonder about belonging for the many immigrant youth in Spain. I wonder about studying it here in the U.S. I wonder whether anyone is studying the links between belonging and policy, how school policies might make a difference for youth experiences of belonging. Could the schools where these boys went in Minneapolis have handled things differently? What about the communities? What can schools do to teach people to be tied to their new country? What, if anything, should they do? And what about policy implementation–does the policy matter if it’s not implemented?
A lot of discussion of language and multicultural policy talks about this very issue, with people having differing opinions about what schools should be doing to foster belonging to the country. I am curious what they actually do, under current policies. And what experiences immigrant youth are having. Perhaps this will be one focus of my dissertation.
What do you feel you belong to? What, if anything, have your schooling experiences had to do with your feelings of belonging?
July 13th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
I feel that I belong here (the USA) and my schooling experience definitely had a lot to do with it. Leaving aside the fact that my entire College education is US-based, I was very much a “local” even when I arrived to study as an undergraduate.
My K-12 Spanish school had no overt plans to make me a junkie of American culture, but I knew my NBA teams better than some classmates at Carnegie Mellon. The entertainment business had placed enough “sales leads” in their products to make me want more, and ultimately I bought the whole package, including citizenship.
There are bigger forces at play than those teachers and books exert on students, and no matter what the doctrine behind educational systems/programs, we should let those larger things work their magic.
July 15th, 2009 at 11:41 am
Interesting that you immediately thought of belonging as being cultural. That’s one aspect of belonging (a really important one I think). I’ve started to think about other kinds of belonging too. What about nationality? What made you feel Spanish? At what point did you start to feel American?
July 22nd, 2009 at 2:47 pm
Belonging is definitely “cultural” for me, but I am sure that comes strictly from an oversimplification of the different dimensions that are possible. While I cannot say what made me feel Spanish, since I never felt otherwise, I can say that feeling American came about after years of living here and feeling the weight of time passing, making me more and more part of something that I was at first simply a visitor to.
In a sense you “pay your dues” by living with the natives and little by little feeling how they welcome you as one of their own, which doesn’t mean you will want to be part of it necessarily (yet I did, of course!)
August 5th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
This is a really interesting topic for me. My own dissertation focuses on the conceptualisation of home to second generation migrants in Australia. It is such a fluid topic, that of home and belonging. Do people who were born here conceptualise home differently to those born overseas but then chose to migrate here?
I love my topic but am finidng it very difficult to keep going. I have actually taken a year off (for visa and immigration purposes) and the thought of going back fills me with both delight and dread.