- Jessica Feggestad: Hi, everybody.
Welcome to our Teaching and Learning Symposium
here at Madison College.
I really appreciate your time with us today.
I know everybody's very busy.
My name is Jessica Feggestad, my pronouns are she/her,
and I'm a faculty member here at Madison College
in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.
Today, we're welcoming Dr. Tony Chambers,
who's here through Badger Talks,
the speaker's bureau for UW-Madison campus.
And it's a great free resource that UW-Madison provides.
And if you're interested, visit badgertalks.wisc.edu.
Before we begin, again, just a reminder
that we're gonna hold questions 'til the end.
So, I'm really excited
to introduce Tony Chambers to you today.
He's going to present
"Flourishing in a Culture of Belonging."
Tony is the director
for Community Well-being at the Center for Healthy Minds
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He also serves as a senior lecturer
in the Department of Counseling Psychology,
teaching in the area of human flourishing,
and lead for community well-being focus
in the Center for Black Excellence and Culture
in Madison.
Tony was appointed and currently serves
on the Wisconsin State Superintendent's
Equity Stakeholder Council
and the Midwest Achievement Gap Research Alliance.
He's also published widely
in professional journals and edited books,
and I wanted to mention his publications include
a co-edited book, edited book,
Higher Education for the Public Good:
Emerging Voices from a National Movement.
And so with that, please join me in welcoming Tony Chambers.
[audience applauding]
Thank you so much, thank you.
- Tony Chambers: So, welcome.
I, like most of my colleagues, like to start any conversation,
collective conversation we have, with what we call a practice.
My colleague Richie Davidson
likes to call it clearing the lens.
I don't know what that means, but he uses that all the time,
so I'm gonna use it, too.
We're gonna clear the lens for a minute.
So, for those who feel comfortable enough,
I'd like to invite you to just find a relaxed space,
if you would.
We usually tell our students to close all of your computers
and turn your phone off for a minute.
If you could just find a space that's comfortable for you.
I invite you, if you want to close your eyes,
feel free to do so.
If you don't want to close your eyes
or if you don't even want to participate in this,
if you could just, you know, gaze at something straight ahead
and just find a peaceful and quiet place for yourself.
So, I'd like to take a couple of minutes.
You know, belonging has never been more important
in the world in which we live.
The pandemic taught us so much.
Many of us today, this week, this year,
have been pushed into thinking about where we belong,
if we belong, and in some cases, why we belong.
So our discussion today
is on everybody's mind in one way or another.
The Zulu people in the southern part of Africa,
when they encounter somebody, they greet them with this,
this really interesting greeting.
They say, "Sawubona," "Sawubona,"
which means, "I see you."
And the response is, "Sikhona,"
which means "I am here to be seen."
"I see you."
"I am here to be seen."
That's the essence of belonging:
to be seen and to be present to receive the seeing.
I'd like for us to think about that
when we encounter one another, when we encounter our students,
when we encounter our families, neighbors, friends.
And most of all,
I'd like for us to hold that and think about that
when we encounter those who we think are others,
who are not others,
who are us.
Sawubona, Sikhona.
Thank you all.
Now, thank you for indulging me with that for a minute.
Flourishing in a culture of belonging, right?
By the way, if you want to know how to spell that,
because there it is.
Okay.
So, let me continue with what I started with.
The notion of belonging has shown up everywhere.
In fact, it's the buzzword of this last
five, six, seven, nine, ten years.
People have embraced the concept from a political perspective.
They've embraced it
from an emotional-psychological perspective.
We've evolved a cottage industry of researchers,
researchers and others,
who have tried to understand what that means
and what are the implications of belonging or not belonging.
I'll mention in a little while
the Surgeon General Vivek Murthy's recent report,
2023 report, on the epidemic of loneliness,
which is related to the concept of belonging.
So, belonging is part of our current
and probably our future lexicon.
So we'll be talking about this
or at least trying to make sense of it
for the next decades, maybe centuries.
And I will tell you that every conflict in our world,
whether it's on a personal level
or whether it's on a geo-global level,
is related to the concept of belonging.
It's either those of us who are seeking to belong
with and to something
or those of us who are trying to restrict others from belonging.
So, we are looking for it,
or we're trying to restrict others from belonging.
And that is the center of all of our conflicts.
It's also the center of most of our human joy
and human flourishing around us
because what we understand about belonging
is that it has significant psychological, emotional,
behavioral, physical implications,
positive implications when one belongs.
And we're gonna get into that in a little bit.
So, we know that it's the center of conflict.
We know that it is at the foundation of most of our joy
and most of our flourishing.
Let me start by sharing with you something
that we do at the Center for Healthy Minds.
Just for my entertainment,
how many of you know about the Center for Healthy Minds?
Good.
It's an interesting place to work.
It's interesting things that we do there.
But for those who don't know, the Center for Healthy Minds
is a research center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
that is a center that explores the brain, basically,
and what happens in the brain when people engage
in certain types of behavior that changes,
you know, pretty much your physical,
mental, and emotional health.
So, we explore what goes on in the brain,
particularly when it comes to things
like contemplative practice.
We want to know what happens in the brains of people
that have certain kind of maladies
like Alzheimer's disease, asthma,
and these kind of things.
And what we try to do is try to work with those folks
who are in those communities,
health care professionals and others, teachers,
to try to elevate these things and help people
that they work with develop better lives.
That's shorthand for, I think, what we do.
And Richard Davidson, who some of you all may know,
neuroscientist,
and he likes to say, friend of the Dalai Lama.
I've never met the Dalai Lama, so I can't verify any of that.
So let's assume it's true.
And he leads,
he tells us that we want to reduce suffering in the world
by the scientific study of the mind.
And that's pretty much what we do.
We also do quite a bit of outreach.
One of the things that we do and started doing is teaching.
We have an initiative called the Human Flourishing Initiative.
It's actually called the Art and Science of Human Flourishing.
And one of the things we do in that initiative
is we teach undergraduate students.
This semester, we have 360 of them in one class.
We teach them about some of the components
of a flourishing life, of which these are some of them.
And we have this model that's both the research model
as well as a model that guides us through our teaching.
And the model is awareness,
connection, insight, and purpose.
We changed it to integration, but purpose.
And in the 15-week class, we explore these,
this model and have these related components,
related themes for each of the class periods.
And the class period that we're on this week,
surprisingly enough, serendipitously, is belonging.
So I was able to engage our 360 students this week,
Monday and Wednesday, around the topic of belonging.
Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, actually,
on the topic of belonging.
And what I want to share with you all today
are some of the lessons I've learned from my students,
as well as some of the lessons
that I've learned through this Badger Talk experience,
of which I've been able to go around the state of Wisconsin.
I've been able to experience, to explore the concept
of belonging with folks at different universities
across the country.
And I didn't know I was doing this,
but I was exploring the concept of belonging
in previous life experiences, which I think are quite relevant
and illuminates my understanding,
and hopefully will be of value to you all,
my understanding about the concept of belonging.
So, that's all preface to say I'm a curious human being.
I think I've learned some stuff.
I'm quite open to learning more stuff from other folks
anywhere about this concept of belonging
because I think at some point, it's the center
of most of where we're at right now as a world,
certainly as a nation, right,
and as a community here in Madison.
So, all preface.
Got me going.
This is what I do in class
because I know first-year students,
and I'm not saying, you all, I'm equating this group
with first-year students, but I understand
first-year students.
They wannna know, "Well, what are you gonna tell us
that's gonna be on the test?" [audience laughing]
Right, "What are you gonna,
What am I supposed to pay attention to?"
So I start 'em off by telling 'em what to pay attention to.
And then I tell them throughout my conversations with them
what all of this stuff means.
So, let me go through a couple of these things.
These are the takeaways for today.
We're primarily focusing on social and public belonging.
There are other types of belonging,
but we're only focusing on the social and the public belonging.
Belonging impacts well-being psychologically, emotionally,
physically, socially, and pretty much every other way
where there are relationships.
Belonging, and this is important, people,
because we've conflated the concept of DEI
with the concept of belonging.
Belonging is not diversity, equity, and inclusion.
I'll let that settle in for a minute.
And belonging is not consistent
across all human beings all the time
or even the same human being all the time.
Here's another one.
Belonging is not always or not necessarily a good thing.
Belonging does not mean fitting in ŕ la Brené Brown.
Experiencing belonging
is not the same as a sense of belonging.
A sense of belonging is an affect.
It's a feeling, it's an emotion.
Experiencing belonging is behavioral.
And those two are not always the same thing.
Not that they're mutually exclusive,
but they're not the same thing.
Now, here's the one that my students struggle with the most
and the biggest lesson I've ever learned.
And it's the simplest lesson I've ever learned.
That to which you want to belong has to want you to belong to it.
It's not enough to say, "I want to belong."
It's not enough for us to tell our students
and our colleagues and ourselves,
"You belong, therefore, you belong."
That to which you want to belong has to want you to belong to it.
And as I mentioned before,
belonging is at the center of all human conflicts and joys.
If you don't hear anything else I have to say
for the rest of the minutes I'm standing here, this is it.
This is it, folks.
I don't know if I have any much more to tell you.
But let's try to make some sense out of this.
Everybody has seen this thing.
This is Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
And Maslow pretty much tells us that we all, as human beings,
have these basic needs on this system, right?
And he identifies belonging and love
as positioned right between self-esteem
and safety and security.
It is three steps above or below,
depending on how you look at it,
above the need for safety and security
and physiological needs.
We need these things as human beings.
In fact, Maslow would tell us is that it's baked into our DNA.
We are born with these needs, right?
I'm gonna contest that at some point in this conversation,
or at least I'm gonna give a little bit of nuance to it
as we go forward,
but belonging is super important as human beings
in our structure of needs.
Now, I mentioned earlier
there are different types of belonging,
and I'm not gonna go through all of these,
but belonging, at least according to Joe Myers
in his book The Search to Belong,
identifies four areas, four types of belonging
that each of us experience at some point in time
and some of us experience at the same time, right,
with the same people, right?
So, there's the intimate belonging,
which hopefully all of us have experienced,
and that's usually with a loved one or somebody
that's really close to us, or a best friend.
And we share things and we expect things
and we live in relationship with them in ways
that we don't live in relationships with anybody else.
It is the closest relationship we can have, right?
Then there's this personal belonging,
which is the next level, with friends and families,
and we have this mutual relationship
of disclosing information.
And we assume a high level of trust.
Trust is critical in a belonging relationship.
Then there's the social.
And I did mention that most of the conversation
and most of the exploration around belonging
is centered around social and public.
And sometimes they overlap.
But the social belonging is when we experience people that we,
whom we recognize, but we may not know very well, right?
It helps us develop our sense of identity
and sense of who we are.
And social belongings, we often self-select ourself.
We put ourselves in there by selection.
We're not chosen sometimes.
We self-select into these belonging relationships
with those with whom we have
personal or even intimate belonging.
So, it could overlap with the intimate
as well as the personal belonging category.
Then there's this public belonging,
which most of us associate with being members of a city,
being members of an institution that has a mascot.
For example, I am a Badger.
That is my public belonging or my need for public belonging.
I am a Madisonian, right?
This is public belonging.
We associate and connect ourselves
with people in a broader sense.
We don't know 'em well,
but we have this external commonality, right?
So, most of the conversation
and most of the work that's been done
is around the public and the social concept of belonging.
Okay, real quick.
These are some of the potential impacts
of related concepts or related experience:
isolation, loneliness, as well as the concept of not belonging.
Right?
We know that you all,
as well as the students with whom you work with,
if they feel isolated or if they feel lonely
or feel like they don't belong,
their performance, their persistence,
as well as their level of engagement
with the important things that contribute
to their academic success are impacted, right?
If they don't experience belonging
in the places that are important,
in these institutions,
then their performance, their very existence,
their success is impacted negatively.
Now, this one I found really interesting,
is that, as far as the neuroscience of it all,
when you have a sense of belonging
or not a sense of belonging,
it elicits within your neurotransmitters
the same kind of cravings
that are strong when it comes to hunger and thirst.
So, we know that there are parts of your brain
that are triggered when you're hungry and thirsty.
And those transmitters and that experience
is quite the same thing as when you're isolated and lonely.
In fact, much of what we understand
is that the pain receptors in your body,
the things that elicit pain,
that tell you you're hurting physically,
are the same kind of things that you experience
when you feel isolated and lonely.
So, isolation, loneliness, not belonging,
your brain can't distinguish
between that and the physical pain that we go through.
So imagine your students, right,
when they feel like they don't belong or they don't belong.
They're experiencing the same kind of experience
as if you punched them in the face.
Right, or if they were punched in the face.
Not that you punched them in the face.
[all laughing]
So please don't go out here thinking
you're gonna do an experiment, punch 'em in the face.
Leave 'em alone, okay?
Not the same thing.
We also know that for those who feel lonely
and not like they belong, is that they make,
they're a little bit more pessimistic.
They don't see the glass half full.
They see the glass not only half empty, but almost totally empty.
We know this to be true.
They're less trusting of other people, right?
And they contribute, and this lack of belonging
contributes to some of the cognitive difficulties
they may not have.
They may not have as strong a memory,
or we may not have as strong a memories.
Right?
We may not be able to process information
quite the same way as it's being delivered.
We know that sometimes information goes in.
It's misinterpreted in ways that would not normally be that way
if we belonged or if we didn't feel like we were isolated
or if loneliness wasn't the central characteristic
of our being,
we'd be able to receive information,
process information, make meaning of it,
and apply it in the lives that we live
in more positive ways than we would otherwise.
So, belonging and loneliness and isolation
are not only these subjective feelings that we have.
They actually impact how we live a life,
a flourishing life, a full life, a life at all.
And we know that it can impact mental,
physical, and emotional well-being.
Now, the Surgeon General's--
and these are some of the research projects
that some of my colleagues have been involved in,
as well as some of the projects
that we're trying to explore right now
relative to the effects of isolation
and loneliness and belonging.
Central to this is Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General's report
that was issued back in 2023
that outlines some of the effects
of this epidemic of loneliness that he talks about,
which is, again, related to belonging or not belonging.
Right?
And what he tells us is the population
that's most at risk for loneliness
is older people, seniors.
Right?
Second are young women,
school-age, college-age women and younger.
Right?
The third population that's most at risk for loneliness
are college-age students, generally,
from the 18 to the 26.
Now, it probably applies even beyond that, for sure,
but those are the populations that many of us engage who,
or many of us are.
Right?
So, we know that this epidemic of loneliness
is not only concentrated
amongst people who have physical, mental,
and psychological and emotional challenges,
which is true,
but it has an impact on almost every one of our lives.
And if we ourselves aren't experiencing this,
we know somebody who is experiencing
this epidemic of loneliness, not belonging, or isolation.
And it has serious ramifications on themselves
as well as those of us who care about 'em.
As far as the health,
how social disconnection or social connection works,
and this is a graphic from the Surgeon General's report.
And this is basically a road map
as to how social connection or a lack of social connection
impacts our health outcomes.
Social connection or lack of social connection
impacts our biology
in terms of our stress hormones and inflammation,
which is, some would argue,
the center of most of our physical maladies, right?
Our psychology,
which is our attempt to find meaning and purpose
in the world we live in.
Stress, which, again, much like inflammation,
is at the center of most of our challenges.
Or use stress, or what we call good stress versus distress,
which is the kind of stress that's long term
and has a deeper impact
on almost every part of our well-being.
And our behavior,
our physical activities, the choices we make,
our sleeping pattern, the kind of activities
we engage in that are self-harmful.
I guess one could say it that way.
So, the lack of social connection
or the existence of social connection
impacts our bodies and our minds in all kinds of ways,
which lead to all kinds of social outcomes.
And I will say, and it's not in here,
but I will say there are certain populations
that are affected much more by this dynamic
than other populations.
We know for a fact, and of course,
the Surgeon General identified this,
but we know this to be true anyway,
that women, people of color,
folks in the LGBTQ+ community,
those with certain types of disabilities,
some folks from specific international places,
struggle more with concepts of isolation,
loneliness, and the lack of belonging,
much more so than other populations, right?
And the data for disproportionate health outcomes
or disparate health outcomes reflect that.
And for those of you all in the health care professions,
you could probably verify this in all kinds of ways, right?
These populations are experiencing outrageous impacts
on their health and well-being.
And what exposed this whole thing was, you know,
what happened during the pandemic across the board.
And it continues on.
So, let me shift gears for a quick second.
What are some of the dimensions?
Well, first of all, let me ask,
how many of you ever had an experience of belonging?
Hands raised.
Do that again.
Okay, how many of you ever experienced not belonging?
How many of you have ever had experience
of belonging and you didn't wanna belong?
I know that's confusing.
How about, have you ever had an experience of not belonging
when you actually did wanna belong?
Can you do that last one again?
Not belonging and you really wanted to belong?
Okay, there are a few of you who never had that experience.
That's telling, I'm impressed.
So, what does all that mean, right?
When we talk about belonging,
and much of the research that exposes us to belonging,
we tend to think of it in subjective terms.
It's a feeling, it's a sense.
In fact, we use language like "a sense of belonging."
I did this review of how belonging is referred to
in much of the literature, as well as in
post-secondary education or higher education environments,
and almost all of the language says "sense of learning."
It says this emotion, this feeling of learning,
this feeling like somebody cares about you,
that somebody's got your back,
this feeling like you're in a place that makes you feel
or makes others feel like you belong there.
You feel it.
Then there are these other things
that happen in these spaces
that we don't like to talk about, but are really critical
when we talk about building cultures of belonging,
these objective events and outcomes.
And we'll get to that in a minute.
But essentially what we mean by that
is that there needs to be policies, practices,
symbols, people, resources
that need to be in place to undergird the feelings,
the subjective experiences of belonging, right?
If we don't have these objective experiences
or objective outcomes, then the opportunity to belong,
versus just having a feeling of belonging,
won't be achieved.
And they're very temporal.
The feeling of belonging is a very temporal experience.
It goes, right?
Feelings come, feelings go.
However, to belong, to have experience of belonging,
it's a sustained process.
The other thing that we'll talk about is agency.
And agency simply means, at least in this context,
simply means those who want to belong
have to have some control over how and when they belong.
They have to have a say in the process.
They have to have skin in the game.
It's not enough for us to just tell people, "You belong."
If they don't have agency or skin in the game,
real control, not just this,
you know, "You could come to the table and say what you want,
but it doesn't matter," kind of control,
you have to have some control.
Can you imagine giving control to our students
to have a say and to how, when, where, and what
allows them to experience belonging?
It's not about us, it's about them.
And then the last thing I'll say
is about strength of social networks.
And that's gonna be quite interesting
because it all revolves around a hypothesis
that we're trying to study.
Okay?
So, anybody familiar with this guy john powell?
That's what I'm talking about.
He directs a center at UC Berkeley
called the Center for Belonging and Othering at UC Berkeley.
If you get a chance, go on YouTube or anything online
and just take a look at some of his presentations.
Take a look at the center's website
because I think you'll find it quite interesting.
What powell, what john tells us is that belonging describes
more than a feeling of inclusion or welcome,
more than just a subjective experience,
and that it's a very political process
and it means a shift in power, right, a shift in agency.
In order for belonging to exist for anybody,
they have to have a say.
We have to be willing to shift the distribution of power
in any relationship: educational, families.
Some of us don't even feel like we belong in our families
or in our households, current households.
Some of our children and offspring
don't feel like they belong
or don't have an experience of belonging.
Many of us know this to be true.
So john is telling us it's about a shift in power.
It's not just about a feeling, it's about agency.
It's about creating systems and resources
to support those subjective experiences.
And what happens sometimes when we don't shift the power,
when we don't provide agency for people to have some control,
are two things, this thing he calls--
or, actually, Claude Steele, the psychologist at Stanford,
calls belonging uncertainty.
And it means exactly what it says.
You think you belong, you have a sense of belonging,
and something happens that causes uncertainty
about the sense that you once had.
For example, I went to the University of--
I came to the University of Wisconsin 2016.
And everything around me suggested that I belonged.
The language suggested that.
Some of the symbols and the people suggested that.
And then there's a thing that happens.
And that thing could be very subliminal.
It could be something like
somebody looks at you the wrong way
or an issue that might have come up
that you found to be deep to your,
deep to your own personal sense of being is ignored.
Or you say something in a meeting
and nobody pays attention to you,
and somebody else says the same thing
and they pay attention to them.
It causes you to question,
"Is it because they're telling me
that I actually don't belong here?"
So, the uncertainty comes up.
Our students, and each one of us
have experienced that to some degree.
And depending on who you are in this room
and what environments you go into,
you may experience it more than other people, right?
There's behavioral or belonging uncertainty,
which leads to this other condition
that Claude Steele talks about, attributional ambiguity,
which is essentially, you start to question
the source of these signals about belonging.
"I wonder if that had something to do with my race."
"I wonder if the message that I'm receiving from my dean,
"who actually tells me I belong,
if it had something to do with my race."
"Or it had something to do with the fact
that I'm much more handsome than he is."
[all laughing]
He wouldn't argue that point, by the way.
[all laughing]
So, you have this ambiguity that rises up in you.
Right?
And sometimes, we treat this ambiguity
or our students treat this ambiguity
as what Claude Steele calls stereotype threat.
In other words, we try to act out, right?
We think that folks have a stereotype of us,
so we act in ways that we affirm the stereotype.
We act in ways that we affirm the stereotype,
which takes us further away from ourself
and disconnects us from any sense of agency
and any sense of true belonging.
But we develop a sense of belonging
because we're trying to fit in.
And the distinction between fitting in and belonging,
according to Brené Brown,
fitting in is when you size up a situation,
and if I'm speaking to y'all
and y'all understand what I'm saying,
when you size up a situation
and you do whatever you need to do in order to be accepted.
You wear the mask.
You change your behavior, you change your flow.
Right?
In essence, you change who you are in order to fit in.
Now, is that belonging?
I would say not.
Sometimes we ask those around us to fit in,
and what we're asking them to do,
and they know this to be true, what we're asking them to do
is to size up the situation,
see what you need to do in order to be accepted.
Am I saying something that folks could understand?
Size it up.
We're very good at that.
We look at an audience
or a classroom or a relationship.
Sometimes it's down to the micro level
when we look at somebody
we want to be in an intimate relationship with
and we size the thing up
and we say, "Okay, I'ma wear something different.
"I'ma speak different.
I'm gonna engage them in a very different way."
We're trying to fit in, which is very temporal,
because at some point,
at some point, resentment is gonna set in.
At some point, it's gonna impact your identity formation,
and it's just gonna blow the thing to death.
Things are gonna fall apart.
To belong, as my good friend Parker Palmer used to say,
it's a form of hospitality.
When you belong, it's a form of hospitality,
which essentially means
you enter into a space on your own terms
and you're received for who you are.
You enter a space on your own terms.
You don't have to be somebody else.
You don't have to negotiate your identity.
You don't have to explain your value structure.
You enter in a space of hospitality.
Objective.
We mentioned these, the other dimensions,
the objectives, objective efforts and outcomes.
Symbols, practices, resources, physical structures.
If you look around the campus,
notice what students are looking at.
Notice what you're looking at, whose information,
whose value is privileged just by the symbols.
If it's pictures of your board,
if it's pictures of teachers that receive teaching awards,
if it's pictures of outstanding students.
Now, I would say Madison College
is very different than the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
I'll just put that right there.
Right?
The symbols that are reflected here are much more accepting
and much more expressive
of who belongs and who does not belong.
At least, that's the internalization that I have.
Spaces like the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
though we're trying, I still think we're at a point
where much of what we tell people through our symbols,
through our practices,
through some of the behaviors that we engage in,
many people receive that as "You don't belong here,"
because I don't see myself.
There's no way that you're saying that people like me
belong in places like this.
Agency.
Gotta give up the control.
Or at least you have to share some of the control.
We have to share some of the power.
We have to invite people into a hospitable space
on their own terms and who they are.
These are what the students at Mount Horeb taught me.
These are the students at Shabazz.
Those are the ones that taught me that,
give up the power.
Can you do that, right?
These are the students at West High-- East.
These are the young people that told us,
"We have no agency.
"And we act like it.
"We give people fodder to not give us agency.
"We act like we don't deserve agency
because they won't give us agency."
In order for belonging to occur,
particularly amongst young people,
they have to have a sense of agency,
and we have to release it, or at least share it,
both in a classroom and outside of a classroom.
In our families.
Hard thing to do, I have three boys.
I don't like giving up my power to 'em.
I do not like it.
And when I do, they reflect it in ways
that I wish I hadn't given up the power.
[all laughing]
Some of y'all know what I'm talking about.
[all laughing]
Okay, there's this thing called the strength of social networks.
And we do network analysis, social network analysis.
And in a social network,
what we're trying to say is that those around you
actually influence
and the networks of which you are part of
influences your experience of belonging, okay?
But some of the key characteristics
in that relationship are what we call
frequency of contact with those in the network,
quality of contact with those in the network,
and what I'm calling alignment of contact
with those in the network.
The first two are self-explanatory.
The last one, alignment, is when you think
you're a friend with somebody,
but they don't think they're a friend of yours.
That's a misalignment.
I think I'm friends with my dean.
And I'm so confused by this
because he never considers me a friend.
So when I go and ask him for something,
I think I'm asking for something from a friend.
That is not the way it works.
He's the dean.
We have a chancellor.
I think she's, you know, she's part of my social network.
[chuckling] Not!
[all laughing]
So, here's the theory, here's the hypothesis.
Okay, so, you have this strength of social networks.
You have belonging on the left axis,
and then you have what I'm calling relationships
on the bottom, or strengths of relationships.
And just for sake of argument, we have on the bottom,
there are people you engage with
and that our students engage with that have titles:
dean, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
faculty, president of X organization.
Then you have these acquaintances.
An acquaintance could be more than a title,
but it's somebody you know,
but you don't know 'em well, right?
You don't know 'em well.
You may have coffee with 'em once.
Think about your networks.
There are people that you have acquaintances with,
there's people that have titles,
and then you have this thing called a friend,
which is a high social network,
a high position in a social network.
And these people, you have intimate,
trusting relationships with, right?
So you have title, you have acquaintances, you have friends.
Now the hypothesis is,
the further up this relationship continuum you go,
in other words, from title to friend,
the closer you get to friendship,
the greater your sense of belonging, right?
The more you have in your network
people who you consider to be friends
or high acquaintances,
the greater your sense of belonging.
It looks like that.
Now, what does that mean for us and our students?
Right?
What essentially it means is that we,
if we're concerned about creating spaces of belonging,
we need to create opportunities
for us and our students to engage with people
who actually can make a difference in our lives.
Friends.
We need to find ways in which to create opportunities
for people to get closer to other people,
not just to be close to people with titles
or closer in proximity to different people.
That's why DEI does not, is not belonging.
Because you're in contact with people
who look different than you
and that you could have conversations with them
does not lead you to a stronger sense of belonging
or an experience of belonging.
Find ways in order to create in our environment
for people that we care about
opportunities to actually engage with people,
to develop strong friendships, personal friendships,
connections with people
who have different strengths in the social network.
Because if we continue to stay,
like most of us who are first-generation students,
if we continue to expose students
to people who are like them, first-generation students,
the chances of developing those strong friendships,
i.e., people who can actually make decisions
and help you get what you want to get,
if we don't expose people to that,
the chances of developing a strong sense of belonging
are very slim.
We need to flip the script and stop talking about quantity
and start talking about quality of relationships.
Okay, I should stop right there,
but I'm gonna leave this up here
because I think it's important to know
that there are some downsides to belonging.
Sometimes for us to belong,
that means somebody else can't belong.
I'm in a fraternity, I'm sad to say.
The choice I made to be in the fraternity
was not just because I wanted to be connected,
but I didn't want other people connected.
It's like families, it's like churches,
it's like barbershops.
Same thing.
The myth of superiority.
There's a value.
Belonging is not a value-neutral experience.
Belonging to certain things gives you high status.
It gives you value.
And sometimes the thing to which we want to belong becomes us.
I am the thing that I belong to.
When people introduce themself at parties,
they go, "Oh, what do you do?
Tell me about yourself."
"Well, I'm a psychologist."
That doesn't say anything.
The thing to which I want to belong actually defines me.
It's my identity.
Who am I?
I talk about the thing that I belong to,
and that is not belonging.
That is one of the paradoxes that we deal with
when we talk about belonging.
Even if we ask our students, "Tell me about yourself."
"Well, I'm in engineering."
Or, "I'm in nursing."
That's not a description of themselves.
That's who they belong to and with.
And these are examples.
An example that I give my students
is that when you think about a family, right,
when you think about a family and belonging, are we connected?
Are those intimate and personal relationships?
Or are they social and public?
Right?
If you think about the downside to belonging,
there are people who have associated themselves
with fascism, Nazism,
and other type of very socially harmful gangs.
Because they have a strong need to belong
or they've been conditioned to have a need to belong.
Black barbershops.
Anybody ever been to a Black barbershop?
Come on, talk to me.
It's an anthropological experience.
[chuckling]
If you haven't been to a Black barbershop,
go in for no other reason
than to get an understanding about anthropology.
My fraternity,
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Incorporated, my guys,
I was conditioned to be a part of that.
Is it an intimate and personal belonging experience?
I'm not sure.
Churches, religions,
or even, some people call this a religion,
the Wisconsin Badgers.
[audience laughing]
Or the Green Bay Packers. [chuckling]
Can't say that I bought into that one just yet, but that's...
So, these are the downsides
or at least the nuanced sides of belonging.
It's not always a positive thing.
Sometimes we do things and we internalize the concept
and experience of belonging
in ways that are harmful or not really authentic
and don't reinforce our self of self,
self of identity.
And that's true for our students as well,
so be mindful that when we tell them they should belong
and when we talk about belonging for them,
it's not always value-neutral.
Or it's never value-neutral, actually.
And sometimes it can be harmful.
So be mindful of that.
Okay, I'm gonna leave it at that,
leave this up there, and then we're gonna do Q&A.
But first of all, I want to thank you all
for at least indulging me with all of my ramblings.
And I wanna give a shout-out
to all the organizations and communities
that have taught me things,
the Brodhead community in Wisconsin, Black Earth.
Spent a lot of time with heating and cooling companies
talking about belonging in Black Earth.
Shabazz, East, West High School, Mount Horeb Schools,
and several other schools around the state.
The University of Oregon has been very instrumental
in helping us understand this concept of belonging.
University of Missouri, Penn State, Ohio State,
and UVA, University of Virginia.
So, with that, thank you all very much.
Appreciate you.
[audience applauding]