“I Belong Because It Wasn’t Made for Me”: Understanding Working-Class Students’ Sense of Belonging on Campus

Genia M. Bettencourt

The Journal of Higher Education, 2021, vol. 92, issue 5, 760-783

Abstract: Sense of belonging has been used to gauge students’ adjustment to and persistence within higher education. Social class is associated with sense of belonging and working-class students report lower levels than their middle- and upper-class peers. In this study, I examined how working-class students described their sense of belonging through a critical constructivist narrative inquiry of 24 working-class students across two public research institutions. I found that students developed academic and co-curricular spaces of connectedness to challenge the broader campus culture that they saw as catering to middle- and upper-class students. The same resources were supportive or unsupportive depending on students’ circumstances. Belonging was viewed as something that students themselves created rather than was facilitated by institutions. Moreover, while participants expressed varying degrees of support, connectedness, and belonging, they rarely felt valued by institutions that exploited their labor or tokenized their presence under the guise of supporting diversity. Implications from this research suggest the need to revisit conceptualizations of sense of belonging while providing recognition of working-class contributions, increasing cultural competence, and developing additional structural supports for students.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00221546.2021.1872288 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:uhejxx:v:92:y:2021:i:5:p:760-783

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/uhej20

DOI: 10.1080/00221546.2021.1872288

Access Statistics for this article

The Journal of Higher Education is currently edited by Mitchell Chang

More articles in The Journal of Higher Education from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().