home

//**Belongingness in High School**//

//Maximus Kim//



//**Why Belongingness?**// Throughout guided practice we’ve looked at individual strategies of improving second language acquisition and content area knowledge; so much so in fact that we as teachers sometimes lose sight of the thorny multi-dimensional curricular issue of belongingness. One way of approaching belongingness is by talking about it as a basic human need; in psychological and educational literature, belongingness is a universal and innate human need that, if cultivated, can lead to optimal attitudes toward schooling (Nichols, 2006). Although much of the research (e.g., Lopez & Salas, 2006; McMahon & Wernsman, 2009; Nichols, 2006), highlight the link between belonging and motivation in school settings, most of these findings are partial and limited in that they avoid the thorny, multi-dimensional, and sometimes enigmatic topic of the need to, for instance, celebrate aesthetics. Contrary to traditionalist views of culture and spirituality, the process of redefining ethnic identity and the reconstruction of alternative communities can play a vital role in strengthening belongingness (Nagel, 1994).

Why should teachers invest their precious time and energy on belongingness when they have so much else to worry about? Simply put: students who do not feel accepted by the broader culture, the school, their classmates, and teachers gradually “withdraw from school life, and become disaffected from school. Some disaffected students are disruptive in class, and exert a negative influence on other students” (Willms, 2000, p. 3). And we already know from language specialist Stephen Krashen that language acquisition best happens when motivation and self-esteem are high and anxiety is low or near-zero (Krashen, 2011). Moreover, we ought not underestimate the degree to which the lack of a sense of belonging can and often does alter the way that even our high achieving students approach certain assignments and content areas (Johnson, 2009). In the case of my very own school site, my high achieving, case study student Sandy has both self-esteem issues and chronic anxiety. The way that the school culture unconsciously categorizes her as “unassimilated” and “abnormal” may, in fact, be affecting her self-esteem, and in turn negatively mediating her academic achievement.



//**The Chicken or The Egg?**// Does a lack of belongingness cause poor academic achievement? Or, does low achievement cause lack of belongingness? This is precisely the kind of dual predictor-based chicken or egg query I’d like to avoid in this wiki page. For the curious: the most recent studies infer that being disaffected from school causes poor achievement, while the theoretical literature argues that low achievement causes disaffection from school (Willms, 2000, p. 9). Whatever the case may be it would be my contention (and hopefully your belief as well) that belongingness is worth cultivating for the sake of itself; even if in certain cases belongingness has marginal influence on school performance. In fact, certain high achieving countries like Korea and Japan have surprisingly high prevalences of students with low sense of belonging (Willms, 2000, p. 22). Presumably the influence of a strict Asian-identified familial order minimizes, or counterbalances, the influence of low school belongingness (Lee, 2009). Still, what do the Koreans have to lose by being more well-adjusted in school? In the case of Japan the high rate of teenage suicides, related to the //hikikomori// phenomenon, seems to dwarf whatever national pride is gained by high Japanese test scores (Zielenziger, 2007).



As I pointed out in my introduction “belongingness is a universal and innate human need that, if cultivated, can lead to optimal attitudes toward schooling” (Nichols, 2006). Even if our efforts do not immediately result in higher reading and writing scores we ought to nonetheless care about our students’ psychological wellbeing. Take for instance, the example of the precocious 15-year-old Max Fischer in Director Wes Anderson’s 1998 comedy Rushmore. Max was hardly the model student; nonetheless, he infused the school with life, by being the president of the beekeeping society to writing and producing brilliant student plays. Or more poignantly, take the example of my high achieving case study student Sandy. When I asked Sandy how much she missed Mexico, she responded this way: “I feel sad. I feel like my heart is tight. When you have everything in your house and your parents tell you that you need to move to another country that’s very different, and you can’t speak the language it’s very sad. Very scary. . . . yeah, I still have anxiety when I speak English. I don’t think the other students understand me. I love art, but they don’t care” (personal communication, October 21, 2011). As researcher Lisa Johnson points out, “High schools have been described as potent breeding grounds of alienation and boredom. . . In fact, some studies report that as many as 40 to 60 percent of high school students are consistently unengaged, chronically inattentive, and bored” (Johnson, 2009, pp. 99-100). I wonder: How many of these students are potential Max Fischers? How many of them share Sandy’s sense of alienation?



//**Belongingness in a Mexican American Framework**// Frequently, Mexican American and Spanish speaking students find themselves without adequate psychic and social support (Lopez & Salas, 2006). In many instances, a community’s color-blind perspective may in fact mask, not lessen, racialized practices (Lewis, 2001). Despite the range of basic human needs (e.g., the need to celebrate the arts, the need for spirituality, the need for engaged play) educators and administrators at Nogales High School have a tendency to see certain minority youths through the lens of poverty, assimilation and low parent participation. Nogales’ English teachers in their weekly meetings had a tendency to blame low levels of student attention and boredom to the fact that students were either from broken homes or from low-income communities (personal communication, October-November, 2011). How is it that they never thought to look at the role of their Eurocentric curriculum? This is particularly problematic in my school site where we have a total enrollment of 2,252 students; 70 percent of the students are identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged, 80 percent of the students are enrolled at the school are identified as Hispanic or Latino – 27 percent of which are considered English Learners. The majority of the English teachers are white (Padilla, 2011). Virtually no effort was taken to engage with or explore their Mexican American identity or Los Angeles’ Mexican American influence in the arts; quite surprising given the fact that a number of the students were either interested in the arts or planning to go to art school (personal communication, November, 2011). During my ten week stay at Nogales High School, the AP English classes exclusively covered Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet; while, the Humanities classes covered everything (e.g., classical Greek drama/comedy, Egyptian architecture, Judaic myth) except Latin American culture. Even when one looks at the curriculum in its totality and fast-forwards to May 2012 – the students at Nogales High have yet to cover anything at all to do with Mexican American culture or society. If one were not careful the message could easily be: //Hispanic culture is intrinsically less valuable than Anglo-saxon, White culture.// Not surprisingly such attitudes finds itself in virtually all levels of certain school sites in Los Angeles County, arguably the students at Nogales High take the brunt of such unconscious cultural assertions.



//**An Alternative Curriculum?**// How about introducing an alternative curriculum that highlights Los Angeles’ thriving Mexican American avant-garde legacy? The author would propose the introduction of the art collective ASCO, whose name is Spanish for “nausea” and the work of artists such as Gronk, Ruben Ochoa, and Mario Ybarra Jr. The significant feature of these artists are their unwillingness to equate their Chicano/Hispanic ethnic status with lowriders, hip hop, and //cholo// subject matter (Kun, 2005). Today, an increasing number of Southern California artists find themselves redefining what it means to make post/Chicano art that does not rely on the activist mural iconography of the past and the ghetto //beaner// stereotypes of the present (Kun, 2005). Today’s emerging artists assert that ethnicity is constructed; this constructionist view assumes that ethnic boundaries are continuously undergoing alterations and conscious modifications (Nagel, 1994). Consequently groups like ASCO appear to be symptomatic of a broader observation that ethnic boundaries are indeed open to strategic calculations of interest; a cursory revival of avant-garde activities might establish the contours of emergent ethnic boundaries as it relates to the identity of Mexican American youths.



During Christmas Eve, 1971, ASCO performed Stations of the Cross in Whittier Boulevard; the artist Gronk costumed as Pontius Pilate blessed spectators with popcorn, while partner Willie Herron III directed the festivities dressed as a skeleton figure (Fox, Gonzalez & Noriega, 2008). A year later, ASCO staged Walking Mural that took the group through East Los Angeles; artist Patssi Valdez led the parade as a Virgin of Guadalupe in black, as Valdez’s friends reclaimed Whittier Boulevard in silence (Fox, Gonzalez & Noriega, 2008). From the late 1970s until 1987, ASCO organized further outdoor performances that pushed the boundaries of Chicano art; from arranging dinner parties in the middle of traffic islands to sending out existentialist mail art, the ASCO members were continually criticized for being too conceptual – and not brown enough (Kun, 2005). Poorly understood and often misunderstood, ASCO’s work spoke mainly to a transient spirituality, precisely because so many of their projects functioned as phantom sightings. The ephemeral nature of, say Harry Gamboa’s 10-minute performance scripts, not only highlighted such concepts as phantom culture and urban exile, but the very fact that not many Angelinos witnessed the events lends ASCO a kind of halo effect that has shrouded their activities with mystery and inscrutability (Fox, Gonzalez & Noriega, 2008). In return the city itself begins to reverberate; individual spectators begin to unintentionally imagine ghostly ASCO events lurking in every nook and barrio - and what was once mundane turns deftly sacred.



The artists in Los Angeles County Museum of Arts’ 2008 exhibition //Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement// serve and share the same symbolic vocabulary generated by ASCO. An artist like Ruben Ochoa (born 1974) investigates some of the most mundane spots in Los Angeles (e.g. commercial billboards, freeway walls) by delivering exhibitions to neighborhoods not often exposed to high art; the enduring ASCO undercurrent in Ochoa’s work being an obsession with geography and the dissemination of public art (Fox, Gonzalez & Noriega, 2008). Artist Carlee Fernandez (born 1973) attempts to further broaden Ochoa’s aesthetic vocabulary in a series of self-portraits as she holds giant black and white photographs of artists (e.g. Franz West, architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser, filmmaker Werner Herzog) (Fox, Gonzalez & Noriega, 2008). Like ASCO, there is the distinct feature of masquerade that pervades Fernandez’s activities; she appears to be taking what social researchers identify as the symbolic construction of community quite literally (Nagel, 1994). In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the tomb of the unknown soldier is perhaps the most reminiscent symbol of modern nationalism precisely because it is an icon that is deliberately empty; such symbols are cultural invitations for anyone to interpret and fill in (Nagel, 1994). Fernandez’s body acts in a similar manner; her corporeality is deliberately empty – a blank space that invites the gaze of inculcated beliefs and socialized behaviors.



//**Application**// After interviewing Teacher Martha Solano the author gained a better appreciation of Nogales High’s strengths and weaknesses. For Solano, perhaps the best way of encapsulating her best efforts is to focus on the fact that she is indeed maintaining strong relationships with students and teachers; Solano additionally attempts to engage her Humanities students by having them work on “authentic, creative activities” while giving students a certain degree of choice (personal communication, November, 2011). Students are free to come into her classroom at any time to rehearse plays or simply hang out (M. Solano, personal communication, November, 2011). Here, however, we encounter the first paradox of such an open door policy; on the surface, it seems as if a less hierarchical, open approach to schooling would inevitably lead to higher perceptions of school belonging. However, the author noticed during multiple site observations that many of the students were still either disaffected or bored by the lessons.



This gap between seeming belongingness and actual classroom inattentiveness is a mirror image of how belongingness is accounted for in the broader research. I have attempted in this wiki page to deviate from the ubiquitous topic of teacher support and high expectations for students; I assume that we are all more or less on board on these two points. To be clear: the research is quite unambiguous that “Schools have higher levels of student engagement when there is a strong disciplinary climate, good student-teacher relations and high expectations for student success. . . . student engagement has more to do with the culture of the school and teachers and principals can play a strong role in creating a positive culture” (Willms, 2000, p. 55). I’d like to stress the point that “creating a positive culture” is not only the general aspects of good manners, openness, and the deployment of sociocultural theory – but can be broadened to the inclusion of a separate explicit curriculum altogether. In my 10 week stay at Nogales High I did not have the classtime leeway to cross into the terrain of the Mexican American avant-garde history; nonetheless, I lent copies of my books on Chicano art to my Hispanic students, while always introducing the topic to my students during lunch and after school hours - and encouraged my students to start a club on the topic of Los Angeles’ hidden Chicano avant-garde art history. The lesson: The constraints of a district-mandated curriculum does not relieve you from the effort of disseminating an alternative student-specific curriculum; especially, if that curriculum could potentially aid in boosting student’s sense of identity and general belongingness.



//**Conclusion**// “The proper functioning of art in high schools is not only important for its own sake but for what it can do toward reviving the static and artificial high school curriculum. It can re-vitalize education and put it back into the circulation of life” (D’Amico, 1936, p. 28). Too often in our profession, arts education is put on the back burner, and even when the arts are finally addressed – the European tradition crowds out anything that resembles the Mexican American avant-garde legacy. In the author’s own high school experience, the closest thing to the avant-garde was an introduction to French Dada – and there one got the sense that the avant-garde was dead and long ago lost.



In short, perhaps the ultimate lesson of ASCO is that one should never be too comfortable with how one perceives a child’s ethnic identity. As Joane Nagel points out, “the origin, content, and form of ethnicity reflect the creative choices of individuals” (Nagel, 1994, p. 152). Invariably some may point to this essay and even point to Nagel’s perspective as a mutated form of decaffeinated multiculturalism, the result of a fashionable postmodern “melting pot” mentality that erases the traces of ethnicity with an identity politics without identity politics. To such skeptics the author is reminded of the sentiments of Ybarra’s Edward James Olmos theory of Chicano art. Artist Ybarra and his generation want to be less like James Olmos’ character in “Zoot Suit” – where Olmos plays a prison tough – and more like Olmos’ character in “Blade Runner” where he speaks a street patois of English, Spanish, French Chinese, Hungarian, and German in a future Los Angeles in the year 2029 (Kun, 2005). The idea, of course, is not to repress your Mexican-ness; rather, Ybarra simply finds himself in a globalized polyglot world – in such a context, it makes little sense to repress Los Angeles’ multiple cultural realities.





//I love the visuals, and especially love that you managed to weave in not only Rushmore but also Bladerunner - nicely done! ending is very powerful - who would have know when Bladerunner came out that in the real 2009, bilingualism is legally forbidden in public schools in LA unless there is a special waiver. It seems we've taken more than one step backwards; will we get two steps ahead?//

//**References**// Alvarez-Jimenez, A., Darnell, A., & Kuperminc, G. (2008). Parent involvement in the academic adjustment of Latino middle and high school youth: Teacher expectations and school belonging as mediators. Journal of Adolescence, 31, 469-483. Doane, A. (2006). What is racism? Racial discourse and racial politics. Critical Sociology, 32, 255-274. doi:10.1163/156916306777835303 Fox, H., Gonzalez, R., & Noriega, C. (2008). Phantom sightings: Art after the Chicano movement. Los Angeles: LACMA. Johnson, L. (2009). School Contexts and Student Belonging: A Mixed Methods Study of an Innovative High School. The School Community Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1. Kun, J. (2005, January 9). The new chicano movement. Los Angeles Times Magazine, pp. 12-15, 29, 31, 32. Krashen, S. (2011). Krashen’s Theory of Second Language Acquisition [Video Post]. Retrieved from http://www.2sc.usc.edu/ Lee, S. (2009). Unraveling the “Model Minority” Stereotype. New York: Teachers College Press. Lewis, A. (2001). There is no “Race” in the schoolyard: Color-blind ideology in an (almost) all-white school. American Educational Research Journal, 38, 781-811. Lopez, E., & Salas, L. (2006). Assessing social support in Mexican and Mexican American high school students. Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 5, 97- 106. McMahon, S., & Wernsman, J. (2009). The relation of classroom environment and school belonging to academic self-efficacy among urban fourth- and fifth-grade students. The Elementary School Journal, 109, 267-281. Nagel, J. (1994). Constructing Ethnicity: Creating and recreating ethnic identity and culture. Social Problems, 41, 152-176. Nichols, S. (2006). Teachers’ and students’ beliefs about student belonging in one middle school. The Elementary School Jounral, 106, 255-271. Padilla, N. (2011). 2009-2010 School Accountability Report Card. Retrieved from http://nhs.rowlandschools.org Willms, J. (2000). Student Engagement at School: A sense of Belonging and Participation. Retrieved from http://www.oecd.org Zielenziger, M. (2007). Shutting Out the Sun. New York: Vintage.