The Origins of Belonging

Belonging might be the new word on the block in schools in England, but it’s enjoyed a pretty serious research focus for at least three decades.

Perhaps the seminal study that acts as the foundation of this work comes from Claude Steele, emeritus Professor at Stanford University. In his 2010 book “Whistling Vivaldi”, Steele shares an anecdote from author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Brent Staples.

Because as well as being a generationally talented writer, Staples is a Black man, and a Black man who in the 70s was, in his own words “a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair”. And so, when he walked through Hyde Park in Chicago at the night, on his way home from graduate school, Staples noticed something: White people would tense up, clutch their bags, or cross the street. Couples would squeeze each other a little tighter as he passed. So he started experimenting. When approaching other park goers, he’d whistle Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or sometimes Beatles songs, as he walked. And what did he see? People’s reactions visibly changed. People’s shoulders relaxed, the air got thinner, and they stopped veering off to avoid him.

Staples was, he later realised, signalling something specific to passersby. He was telling them “I’m not a threat.” He did this by demonstrating that he was educated, which he bet would lead to the inference that he was therefore safe. (You can read Staples original paper from 1986 recounting the experience here).

Of course, it’s depressing to read this; that he needed to do it at all. The cognitive and emotional cost of constantly managing other people’s perceptions of you is enormous and ultimately, here, rooted in internalised racist assumptions.

Steele read about this and had a very specific question: how did this process affect performance. This took a human experience and turned it into a research programme, and one that is of huge relevance to educators. So, in a series of studies starting in the early 1990s, Steele and his collaborators showed that simply reminding people of a negative stereotype about their group, just before a test, was enough to harm their performance.

The first famous study, with Joshua Aronson began in the early 90s, and was published in 1995 under the title ‘Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans’. They gave Black and white Stanford students a difficult verbal test from the GRE. Half were told it was a measure of intellectual ability. The other half were told it was a problem-solving exercise that wasn’t diagnostic of ability. The white students performed about the same in both conditions. The Black students in the “ability” condition performed significantly worse than those in the “problem-solving” condition.

The specific stereotype here, of course, is the mendacious trope that Black people are less intelligent than Whites, which was a long embedded trope in the American story, and was seeing a resurgence with the rise of scientific racism in the 90s (the Bell Curve was published the year before Steele and Aronson’s study).

Spencer was interested in whether the impact of stereotype threat went beyond race, though. And so in 1999 conducted an experiment with women around maths, which was (and still is) a male dominated field. They found the same pattern. In the a study they preceded one maths test with some information about how men typically do better on the test, and they saw women’s performance drops at statistically significant levels. But when they told women that the test shows no gender differences, the gap disappeared.

The replication record on stereotype threat has been mixed in recent years, and some of the original effect sizes look smaller under closer scrutiny. But the broader insight has held up. There’s something about uncertainty around belonging, the wondering whether you’re really welcome and whether you’ll confirm what people already think, that makes it harder to do cognitively demanding work.

This is where the line runs from Steele’s stereotype threat research to the contemporary belonging literature. Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen took the insight and asked what schools could actually do about it. Their research showed that small, well-timed interventions, telling students that everyone struggles initially and that doubts about belonging are normal and pass, can produce sustained effects on academic performance, particularly for students from underrepresented groups.

For teachers and leaders, this points somewhere quite specific. It’s about understanding what’s happening in a child’s head when they walk into a classroomC and specially around cognitive load theory. We all now are well rehearsed in the idea that the more we ask working memory to process at once, the more likely it is that we will overload the finite resource, leading to confusion and/or task abandonment.

But when we think about cognitive load, it’s usually just in terms of the content itself: are too many steps in a procedure? Is there too much extraneous information on a slide? Is there novel vocabulary hitting kids faster than they can absorb it.

But there’s another kind of cognitive load that often goes unnoticed. If a child is wondering whether they belong in this classroom, whether the teacher likes them, whether they’ll be laughed at if they get the answer wrong, whether their peers think they’re stupid, that wondering is using working memory. It’s essentially a tax on cognitive resources, restricting the already limited bandwidth they don’t have for the lesson.

So although Belonging has a reputation for some as a fluffy moral goal outside of the business of learning, we can see how the origins of the research were grounded almost entirely in performance and the impact on cognitive process.

securing a greater sense of belonging is, I believe, an end in its own right (and I’m happy for it to be a fluffy moral goal). But if you only care about learning the most amount possible in the six hours that they are in school, then securing belonging buys you increased working memory available for the content of the lesson.

This reframes what we’re doing when we create classrooms where every child feels they belong. We’re making it cognitively possible for kids to learn what we want them to learn.

Brent Staples didn’t whistle Vivaldi because he wanted to entertain. He whistled it because the alternative was carrying exhausting levels of vigilance through every walk home, and deploying counter measures aimed at neutralising stereotypes. The irony, or tragedy, of what Steele showed is that doing this has an impact on performance which only acts as confirmation of the stereotype.

Maybe at least some of our pupils are doing something similar. They’re scanning, assessing perceptions whistling Vivaldi in classrooms, every day. And if that has an impact on their performance, they may just conclude that learning isn’t for them.

So the work of teaching is, at least in part, the work of making that whistling unnecessary.