Fostering Belonging in Choral Contexts

The November/December 2023 issue of Choral Journal is online and features an article titled “Fostering Belonging in Choral Contexts” by Elizabeth Cassidy Parker. Following is a portion from the article.
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Belonging has made an impactful resurgence in schools, universities, community music spaces, national organizations, and corporate America.1 As amplified by “A Place of Belonging,” ACDA’s 2023 National Conference theme, belonging reflects a critical companion to access, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and exemplifies a multi-layered and context-dependent construct. The following brief research report aims to examine belonging in psychological research, synthesize research on belonging and adjacent topics in choral music, such as relatedness and community, and offer future considerations toward fostering belonging in choral contexts.

A Primer
Early in his writings on basic human needs, Abraham Maslow positioned belonging just above physiological needs such as food, water, and physical safety.2

With physiological needs met, Maslow proposed that persons feel driven to build relationships with others, to experience affection, and look to where they fit within a group.3 Later in the twentieth century, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary’s meta-analysis stated that belonging involves frequent personal contact or interactions with another person who demonstrates concern and stability into the foreseeable future.4

To Baumeister and Leary, the frequency of contact and consistency of interaction with another person was significant. A changing series of persons would be less satisfactory than repeated interactions with the same persons, as would relatedness with another person without regular contact.5 More recent research with high school students regarding their experiences of belonging at school affirms the importance of students’ feeling connected to a specific teacher, a general connection to all teachers, a perception of fitting in with one’s peers, and identifying with and regularly participating in school activities.6

Notes
1 Evan Carr, Andrew Reece, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, and Alexi Robichaux, “The Value of Belonging at Work.” Harvard Business Review, no. 16 (2019). https://hbr.org/2019/12/the-value-of-belonging-atwork.
2 Abraham H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation.” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (1943): 370–96.
3 Ibid., 381.
4 Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation.” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497–529.
5 Ibid., 497.
6 Tanner L. Wallace, Ye Feifei, and Vichet Chhuon, “Subdimensions Subdimensions of Adolescent Belonging in High School.” Applied Developmental Science 16, no. 3 (2012): 122–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/10888691.2012.695256.

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Read the full article in the November/December 2023 issue of Choral Journal. acda.org/choraljournal