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Recent Crown Institute research on the Trust and Belonging study (Alvarez et al., ; Teeters et al., , ) has identified key elements that enhance engagement, interconnectedness, agency, and justice in educational settings. These elements are crucial for supporting students' diverse experiences and identities, which in turn helps build a more inclusive and dynamic learning environment.  

In this article, we share five practical suggestions for educators to implement in their classrooms. These strategies are designed to nurture trust, foster a sense of belonging, and empower students by acknowledging and integrating their unique identities and experiences.

1. Use multiple modalities, especially the arts, to engage identity, imagination, and agency

Multi-modal approaches support imagination and creativity and allow for students from diverse linguistic and literary backgrounds to express themselves in varying formats. Activities could include writing and illustrating a children’s book, photography, testimonio, drawing, music, poetry, movement or dance, and digital or interactive art forms.

2. Create spaces of trust and belonging

Learning happens most easily when the environment is one of trust and belonging. It is critical to attend to the emotional learning environment and to create a safe space for students and teachers to relate to one another. Trust and belonging can be cultivated by intentionally creating opportunities to foster relationships among peers and between educators and students. One way to do this is to set up a way for students to share what’s on their mind, like a daily check-in that is unrelated to academic content. When students feel “seen” by their teachers, they report a greater sense of belonging. Belonging can also be cultivated by inviting students’ stories into the classroom.

3. Examine history and power within the educational context

While supporting students to tell their stories and explore their identities can be a powerful vehicle toward educational justice, it is important to consider historical and asymmetrical power relations transparently and carefully (i.e., who has the power to influence society and culture, to make the rules, and whose voices are missing) in order to ground pedagogical approaches toward students’ experiences and their daily realities.

4. Invite students’ full experiences into the learning environment, including challenging experiences

Recent scholarship has brought attention to the need for educators and schools to understand students’ experiences that present challenges (Esteban-Guitart, 2021; Poole, 2020). Inviting students to share honestly about challenging experiences, particularly ones that are socially and politically constructed, can allow students to hear their experiences within the stories and experiences of their peers. Sociopolitical challenges are often deeply internalized by students; by sharing them and seeing common connections, students may be able to recontextualize these challenges within broader systems of inequity (Teeters et al., 2022).

5. Link the curriculum to student identity

It is important for students to see themselves reflected within the curriculum. This involves including historical figures and authors that reflect students’ backgrounds and exploring ways to include diverse knowledge systems within the classroom pedagogy. It also involves including students’ own stories in the curriculum with activities such as book making, photo testimonio, digital storytelling, and video creation.