“I Just Get a Different Feeling in This Class”: Belonging as Affective Praxis at a Dutch UrbanSecondary Education School

Abstract

While research on the belonging of diverse student populations has grown over the past decades, it tends to overlook the ways subjective feelings of youth are embedded within inequitable societal and institutional structures. Drawing on concepts from critical affect theory, this article studies the experiences of racialized students at an urban secondary school to identify how teachers' affective practices structure their belonging in pedagogical spaces. The study included 16 students (7 female; 9 male), all of whom were adolescents aged between 14 and 17. The findings based on qualitative interviews with students and a constant comparative analytical method illustrate the ongoing role of earlier racialization experiences in figuring into their affective histories and shaping their present encounters with teachers. Student narratives particularly demonstrate how the systematic dismissal of their feelings, presence, and questions by teachers reinforced an atmosphere of alienation in their previous schools. Alternatively, in their current schools, teachers' attunement to students' emotions and diverse learning experiences, along with their ability to tune into students' lifeworlds through humor and friendly banter, seemed to generate an atmosphere of belonging. It is through such humanizing pedagogical practices that students who are marginalized by dominant power structures are affirmed as engaged learners who deserve equitable attention, care, and joy. By studying belonging as an affective praxis, this paper expands our understanding of belonging as a relational and political phenomenon, highlighting the need to develop teachers' critical emotional literacy and praxis.