Finding a Place to Belong

Taylor is the first baseman on our team. He’s quick and alert on the field, a celebrated athlete. He also loves musicals, and often repeats phrases and lyrics from shows. However, he would never share his love of theater with his fellow athletes, for fear of their jokes.

For this reason, he feels like an outsider. He can’t fully share who he is. Taylor is not alone.

We started a discussion in class—in the midst of reading Frankenstein—and I asked students to respond to a prompt: “What does ‘outsider’ mean at our school?” Then we did an exercise to describe different students, places, feelings and cliques at our school.

Students scribbled their responses on 3x5 notecards; I selected the key phrases and put them into a Wordle [2]—a computer-generated word art. This process allowed students to freely express themselves anonymously.

We projected the results on the screen. All of the words spoke to belonging—in a particular place with a particular group of people.

I directed the conversation a little, “So the gym, the theater, the cafeteria are some of the places listed. Are they places you associate with outsiders?”

Jay, a starter for the soccer team responded, “I’m always at the gym with my friends, and we’re not outsiders.”

“Yeah,” added Kayla, a member of the school yearbook. “And my friends and I always sit together at the cafeteria.”

Mackenzie, one of the thespians was not going to be left out of the discussion, “And everyone in the musical cast totally gets along too. I don’t get it.”

“So these are places where your group fits in?” I asked.

The trio agreed.

“Well, what if you’re not in your group?”

After they wrapped their minds around the awkward pronouns in that rhetorical question, some subtle nods of understanding and affirmation could be seen throughout the room.

“These are places that you feel like you belong, where you have a group of friends, where you are not the outsider,” I explained. “But, if you’re not in that group, if those aren’t your friends, you might look at the gym as an alien space, or the cafeteria as a crowded room full of strangers, or the theater as a different country. If you’re not on the inside of the group, you are an ‘outsider.’”

Taylor smiled at that moment in class. So did Sarah, the cross-country runner who felt like an intruder anytime she went into the weight room. And Lori too, who would rather eat lunch in the library than try to find a table in the cafeteria.

I’ve done this exercise with any number of books—The Catcher in the Rye, The Bean Trees, Seedfolks, Frankenstein. The idea of the outsider is common in the literature we teach at school, and so many of our students feel like outsiders at times. We can change that. The first step is awareness. We all fit differently into place at school, but we all need a place to fit, a place where we are not on the outside looking in.

Elliott is a high school English teacher in Texas.