Amid the timeless debate on the purpose of education, it strikes me that dominant perspectives on all sides continue to be crafted through the lens of future-focused production (Sleeter, 2015). Strained perspectives agree that preferred educational outputs are citizens with specified characteristics but are conflicted in their prioritising and weighting of which ones. On both sides, the product specification can be seemingly endless. Yet, there is a critical component missing: who are our learners now? What unique knowledge systems enrich our classrooms? How can these identities enhance our classrooms and our curriculums? This blog post proposes the recognition and integration of students’ unique heritages to enrich their educational experience through belonging.

Opening with a personal reflection, I was introduced to folk music at an early age by my grandfather, a talented, self-taught, accordionist. Family parties and celebrations were ceilidhs accompanied by traditional music, emanating from ancestral fingers, on pianos, guitars, accordions and fiddles, while gravelled voices recounted Scots tales through song. In contrast, my instrumental lessons at school offered a classical curriculum only, and in doing so, enforced an unspoken hierarchy of cultural value. This divergence created two distinct musical identities that I navigated in parallel. I embodied one at home and another at school. The experience illustrates for me the potential for educational systems to either bridge or widen the gap between personal heritage and imposed identities.

In the early years of childhood, there is greater advocacy for the value and the beauty in the explorative act of ‘becoming’ (Gheaus, 2015). Yet, as generations progress through formalised education, such advocacy dries up and our impatience for a preferred citizenship begins. Our market-driven system intervenes, prescribing what these developing, malleable brains must become and produce, and by when. And so each learner unwittingly enters into the race towards a perceived, intangible completion.

We lament the exponential rise of anxiety disorders among our learners (Campbell, 2024). Yet crafted competition between our educational institutions compels us to focus learners’ energy and aspirations on an imagined future: one just out of reach and often prescribed for, and not with, them. We speak about what they will achieve next week, next term and next year. We compel them to prepare for upcoming prelims and exams, and we have built a vocabulary for them of next steps, predicted grades, minimum target grades, progression and destinations. We speak often of when but never of who: when they’re studying A Levels, when they’re at university, when they’re in work.

This relentless focus on an unseen future creates the perfect cognitive environment for anxious thought cycles; an untethered propulsion towards a future imagined by someone else. A learned fixation on momentum conditions us to seek unrequited connection with the yet-to-come and alienates us from our present and our past.

‘If we wish to kindle a curiosity that learners carry into their futures, we must recognise that curiosity blossoms within the safety of belonging, and we cannot belong to an unknown. We cannot forge deep connections with an unseen that has been imagined by a system that anonymises us.’

If we wish to kindle a curiosity that learners carry into their futures, we must recognise that curiosity blossoms within the safety of belonging, and we cannot belong to an unknown. We cannot forge deep connections with an unseen that has been imagined by a system that anonymises us.

Lofthouse and Gunning (2022) present a framework for ‘attuned teaching’, which states that, in order for a child to thrive, they must feel safe and known in their school community. I propose that the powerful act of not only seeking to know our learners, but also of supporting their exploration of how they know and are known within their unique communities, could develop a powerful skill of conscious, transferable belonging.

I live in Leeds, England, hundreds of miles from my home city of Glasgow in Scotland. Once a week my fiddle and I can be found at a Celtic folk session in a small backroom of a local community pub. I wonder if, when I arrived in this new city nine years ago seeking professional and academic opportunities, a democratisation of those identities within my education would have prepared me to seek out the familial comfort of these sessions sooner, and saved me much loneliness so far from home.

The path to embedding change within such a system is fraught with challenge. Yet, there is such joyful potential in a curricular and pedagogical approach that learns from, and rejoices in, the unique cultural heritage that learners bring to their education. An education system that fosters and nurtures deep connections between people and places of learning, encouraging an exploration of roots while collaboratively crafting wings, could offer a transformative shift.