Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict and Migration

 

What would it take to ensure that all young people have access to learning that enables them to feel a sense of belonging and prepares them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures? This is a question we have found educators in contexts of conflict and migration ask of themselves each day. And each day, in classrooms around the world, educators are acting in response to this question.

Educators are figuring out what to teach, ways to teach, and how to foster relationships of learning and belonging.

We learn from educators how they create space for dissent, for dialogue, for trust, for new identities, for future-building, and how they envision and build newly imagined and welcoming communities.

Pedagogies of belonging, featured in this book and in its title, emerge from these ways of thinking and acting by educators. We see across educators that what they teach, how they teach, and why they teach in the ways they do come together to enable all young people to feel a sense of belonging and prepare them to help build more peaceful and equitable futures.

This book is about educators and for educators. It is about the practices educators have developed to create welcoming communities in settings of conflict and migration. Each chapter is a “microportrait” of one educator who we have come to know by spending time in their classroom and school.

We focus on the why and the how of practices educators use. We show, through text and art, how educators learn about their students’ experiences, needs, and desires. We describe how educators develop practices to meet these learning and belonging goals. And we recognize how educators address struggles that necessarily arise in this work. We hope the practices give us each ideas to try out in our own classrooms, schools, and other educational sites.

We see patterns in the purposes of the practices educators use, even if the practices themselves vary substantially across contexts. Educators describe creating relevant curriculum for their students, often despite rigidity in the content they are expected to cover. They show how they recognize identities students bring to the classroom and ones they create newly in the place they now live. They emphasize how building relationships forms a foundation for experiences of learning and belonging, and they explain how they foster these relationships between students and teachers and among students. Educators demonstrate how they engage in future-building with their students, even when the future seems scary and unknown. They explain how often these practices compel them to act with resistance, often at great risk, to what school and national structures expect them to do and what their previous practices had been. Each of these practices do not stand alone. Educators show us how they are intertwined and how they all connect to purposes of creating spaces of belonging.

Each microportrait is grounded in research about educator practices. Authors of the microportraits came to know the educators through research projects that included interviews, observations, and sometimes participatory methods. Each project was at least a few months and at times spanned many years. The microportraits include links to articles that can support deeper learning about the contexts and practices of the educators.

This book is a collective project, and we welcome your participation. The intention of this book is that it lives and grows to include more microportraits over time and more patterns of practices that may emerge. Please be in touch with suggestions, to share your experiences with the practices of these educators, or to contribute a microportrait to the collection. You can reach us at reach@gse.harvard.edu.

Gratitude

To the educators whose practices fill these pages, and for the time they shared with us to explain why they do what they do and how they make decisions in situations of struggle.

To the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Cheng Yu Tung Educational Innovation Research Fund who have supported the work on this book.

Editorial Team

Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Hania Mariën

Artist

Wilhelmina Peragine

Authors

Michelle J. Bellino, Shelby Carvalho, Vidur Chopra, Adriana Cortez, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Zuhra Faizi, Vikrant Garg, Carmen Geha, Mara Johnson, Mervi Kaukko, Nomisha Kurian, Celia Reddick, Hiba Salem, Joumana Talhouk, Jane Wilkinson

suggested Citation

[Author(s) of microportrait]. (2023). [“Title of microportrait.”] In Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict and Migration (edited by Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Hania Mariën). Refugee REACH, Harvard Graduate School of Education: Cambridge, www.reach.gse.harvard.edu.

Pedagogies of Belonging: Educators Building Welcoming Communities in Settings of Conflict and Migration © 2023 by Sarah Dryden-Peterson and Hania Mariën is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this publication belong solely to the authors and do not necessarily represent those of REACH or the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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