Currently reading Hamshire et al. (2025) on moving on from belonging, to mattering and trust

While I have worked on student sense of belonging myself, I have also long been wondering if it is not much more complicated than that. Hamshire et al. (2025) write that “[w]hilst seemingly well-intentioned, these assumptions [about how if student only feel belonging, they will come to class and learn] don’t always engage with wider understanding of longstanding structural inequalities and the role of institutions in perpetuating them” and that “belonging is often used uncritically to address an ever-wider range of issues and experiences in academic and policy literature“. So what should we do instead?

One way to avoid at least some of the problems with belonging (for example making it appear as the students’ fault if they for whatever reasons don’t want to belong or want to but don’t feel that they belong, but still want to learn) is to focus on mattering, on showing care and concern to every student, and to make them feel seen.

Showing care and concern (i.e. showing students that they matter, that they are valued, that they can contribute) is — according to our own study — the most important “trust move” that a teacher can make to build a trusting relationship with their students. As Hamshire et al. (2025) write: “Building trust shifts some responsibility from students, who are expected to fit in and belong, to institutions, who should work to help individual students build trust in their institution“. And I find it very interesting to see that apparently several studies found that “students preferred to feel as though they ‘mattered’ to staff members, as opposed to ‘belonging’ to the institution as a whole“, that makes a lot of sense in my intuition!

In their positionality statement, Hamshire et al. (2025) discuss white benevolence and the dangers of saviourism, and share a reference to guidelines for white allies by Bouette and Jackson (2014), that I found so helpful that I’m summarizing it in a nutshell here:

1. Silence is not an option
2. Read to become and stay informed!
3. “Understand how racism is codified in policies and practices and how injustice is normalized in schools and universities”, in who makes the rules and decisions, in how criteria are applied (or not), how language is coded and issues are deflected.
4. “Be prepared to lose ‘friends’ as your status changes to an action-oriented ally” (my emphasis, because I find it so important to make this explicit. As Phryne Fisher says: “Nothing that matters is easy”)
5. Work on unlearning your own racism
6. Let go of some of your privilege
7. Don’t center yourself
8. Make substantial changes to your practice
9. Don’t romanticize faculty of Color

And everybody should definitely read the full article!! But back to mattering and not mattering. In their study on minoritised ethnic students in the UK, Hamshire et al. (2025) find that those students “were aware of the institutional desire for students like them to belong; however, they reflected that although there was an emphasis on belonging, this did not always translate to them feeling that they mattered or were valued“. Examples of when they did feel valued boil down to tiny acts of kindness, and feeling invisible often came from small acts (that might even be well-intended but still has harmful effects — that’s why it is so helpful to share concrete reports of experiences rather than abstract appeals!), like asking another staff for how to pronounce a name rather than asking the student herself. But of course, these types of experiences accumulate quickly. And if teachers cannot even be bothered to ask for a name, then why should students trust them with anything else about themselves, as they rightly point out?

I also really appreciated the point that students have to make the choice between accepting the constant feeling of not fitting in and microaggressions or challenging them and thus making themselves “hyper-visible” (and I can relate to this conflict so much in a different context than race, but where I am consistently pointing out microaggressions and then being told that it cannot possibly be a big deal since nobody else has complained about it before. Yes, maybe not everybody feels in the position to speak up, and I am also starting to question if it is worth the energy… But then I can also just shut up and blend in, and not everybody can do that. And maybe by writing this, instead of relating to the students’ experiences not of racism but of being a foreigner and language learner in a new system, I am centering myself as in 7. above?).

But this paper is very helpful to show how well-intentioned “belonging” interventions are sometimes missing the point and putting the burden on students rather than staff and the institution, and how a focus on showing students they matter and on building trusting relationships can be more productive.

Boutte, G. S., & Jackson, T. O. (2014). Advice to White allies: insights from faculty of Color. Race Ethnicity and Education, 17(5), 623–642. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.759926

Hamshire, C., Wilkinson, R. G., Forsyth, R., & Abdi, A. (2025). From belonging to mattering to trust: the experiences of minoritised ethnic students in UK higher education. Higher Education Research & Development, 1-14.

Featured image: Reading this paper on the ferry back to Sweden. Shocking working conditions!