(UN)Belonging—Inclusive Learning Environments Should Also Provide the Space for Learners Who Choose Not to Belong

As institutions of higher education welcome learners who represent multiple forms of diversity onto their campuses (both in-person and virtual), there is a growing need to attend to sense of belonging as the benefits are clear. Sense of belonging has been linked with learner engagement and success,1,2 and institutions that successfully promote belonging have higher rates of student retention.3 Removing the barriers and promoting belonging, particularly for marginalized groups, can be powerful as it has the potential to humanize the educational experience.2,4 However, belonging is not as straightforward as it appears to be. One of the many lessons we learned from the pandemic was that learning is not fixed in time and space and therefore neither is belonging. Learners, who may have felt belonging to the institution when they had access to campus, felt a distinct lack thereof logging into their classes from home. Belonging is clearly highly contextually mediated. As physical therapy students move between in-person and virtual classrooms and the clinical education environment, belonging must be attended to in multiple spaces and Poole et al5 offered a tool for its assessment in the clinical education environment. In addition, we must remember that if individuals are always evolving, belonging too is also continually in flux and therefore time dependent. As learners leave their communities behind to enter the foreign culture of a new profession,6 they may feel as if they belong nowhere for a period of time.4 One of the Edugraphics in this issue by Magee et al describes how educators and administrators can go about developing a culture of belonging in their programs. While the authors offer a step-wise progression, they also emphasize the iterative nature of belonging. Educators cannot assess belonging at a single point in time and then accept that learners will continue to feel this way while enrolled in their professional programs. While students' feelings of belonging may be bolstered after the excitement of Orientation, what happens to sense of belonging after a student is not as successful as they hoped to be on their first quiz or practical examination? Magee et al illustrate that belonging must be reassessed at strategic time points and then regularly attended to. This work arises from the American Council of Academic Physical Therapy (ACAPT) Task Force on Promoting a Culture of Belonging in Physical Therapy Education formed after the ACAPT National Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Commission Summit7 held in 2022. Magee et al's definition of belonging highlights its complexity. We must also consider that some learners may choose to make the decision not to belong. If learners perceive that belonging is transactional or means having to conform—some may choose not to lose elements of their authentic self and would rather not belong in an existing space. Instead, they create spaces where they feel safe to be their authentic selves. Here, the concept of belonging to self is key. We should acknowledge that we may not be able to make someone belong if they choose not to. However, we are still responsible for creating environments where we welcome students to join as their authentic selves but also recognize that unbelonging could be a positive choice with some learners carving unique spaces for themselves and others. The takeaway is not to free ourselves of the responsibility of cultivating inclusive learning spaces but to avoid the simplistic approach to conceptualizing belonging as uniform. Instead, we must recognize it as nuanced, contextually mediated, and both time and space dependent. Much needed but not straightforward.