Belonging, Fictive Relationships and Education

Fostering a sense of belonging has become an assumed and unquestionable ‘good’ in educational policy and practice in much of the western world, so much so that countless policies and practices are devoted to inculcating it. These activities tend to treat a sense of belonging in educational discourses as unproblematic and ignoring the moral and ethical questions inherent in the enactment. The troubling lack of conceptual analysis of the concept in public policy enables the models used to examine belonging to always be to something outside of the person. I argue that articulating a philosophical account of belonging that embraces a relational account of being in the world requires us to go deeper to consider belonging from the inside. I draw on the concept of Fictive Kinship, an anthropological term for bringing non-kin into kinship relationships I argue that the lack of acknowledgement of the difficulties in achieving these aims and the failure of its proponents to take account of the underlying philosophical issues lead us to question the practicality of the vision as currently voiced. I suggest that how to be for children are not just empirical questions as to behaviour and training for schools, but are inseparable from questions of who we are and what we care about—and that this needs to be reflected in our policy making.