Making meaning of belonging

On a spring afternoon on the ninth floor of Waite Phillips Hall on the USC campus, a small group of Da Vinci RISE High School students are busy writing scripts, sifting through family photos and going over interviews they’ve conducted with relatives. Their instructors offer feedback on shaping the stories each student is creating, listening to recordings and talking through narrative choices. In just a few short weeks, they’ll be watching the culmination of all this hard work—autobiographical short films—on the big screen in Joyce J. Cammilleri Hall, with an audience of peers, loved ones and academics, as a part of the Belonging as Legacy Film Festival. 

The film festival is the celebration of the second year of the Belonging as Legacy program, a new endeavor of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE), housed at the Brain and Creativity Institute. Developed by CANDLE director and USC Rossier professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, alongside University of Michigan education professor Jamaal Sharif Matthews, who serves as principal investigator, Belonging as Legacy brings high school students from Da Vinci RISE to the USC campus once a week during the spring for an intensive workshop combining storytelling with hands-on lessons in basic video production. Over the course of the semester, each student produces a video project exploring their life stories and family histories. 

The program is about diving into deeper emotions and ways of thinking, and provides a comforting space for the students to reflect on and share their stories. Some program participants expressed that they struggled with anxiety but nevertheless leapt at the chance to immerse themselves in a new environment and push themselves outside their comfort zones. Others, like Jaden, a senior at Da Vinci RISE, found solace in the opportunity to tell his story to his peers, and to hear theirs in return. 

Jaden says that his grandmother once described him as a “shook-up Coke bottle” with his emotions, and that releasing some of that pressure helps, especially in this environment. “Everybody being open to share [their story] and not being judgmental really helped me out a lot,” he says. “If this person went through that and they’re open to sharing it, then I’m going to be open to sharing, too.” 

Act I: How it started

The seeds for the Belonging as Legacy program started with Matthews, who was interviewing students about the concept of “belonging” as part of his academic research. “The ways in which they were making meaning of belonging didn’t represent ideas or notions that were already out there in the field,” he says. “They were finding a sense of belonging in one’s ancestors.” 

Matthews explains that during the interview process, he spoke to a student from a school named after Malcolm X, with a negative reputation in a segregated district. Despite the school’s stigma, the student said the school’s name “meant something to him,” Matthews says. “He found inspiration as a Black child attending a school named after a prominent Black leader within American history. His sense of belonging was in representing that name well, representing the legacy of Malcolm X.” After these interviews, Matthews expanded his research questions to include the idea that individuals can “pick up or become part of a legacy that ancestors have created for [them].” 

Programs like Belonging as Legacy are experiments in conceiving of a new kind of developmental science in education, which Immordino-Yang calls, “deeply, inherently transdisciplinary and inclusive.” 

Without much literature on the subject, Matthews reached out to Immordino-Yang, whose research dovetails with his own, to collaborate on a project to further explore these ideas. Immordino-Yang describes her work as researching “the ways that teenagers and teachers make meaning, and the ways that those meaning-making processes promote development, well-being and deep understanding, and, ultimately, growth.” Matthews’ work is about meaning-making in a specific context, she distinguishes, as he studies how inner-city Black youths in Detroit “make sense of their experiences as sources of identity and belonging: racial, scholarly and civic.” 

Once Immordino-Yang came on board as a mentor and adviser, the two received a grant from the National Science Foundation to fund the project and a home for it at USC. A separate grant to Immordino-Yang from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative also supported aspects of the program. Immordino-Yang’s work on social-emotional learning provides the research-based academic underpinning for the philosophy of the program. She has published research that looks at how adolescents grapple with understanding complex social experiences and concepts. Her research team found that when teens make sense of social stories by using what she calls “transcendent thinking”—that is, thinking that transcends the here and now to connect to bigger ideas, values and systems-level implications—this process appears to grow their brains in patterns associated with identity development and life satisfaction in young adulthood (p. TK).

In designing the Belonging as Legacy program, Matthews and Immordino-Yang grounded support for participants’ transcendent thinking in the practical activities of storytelling as a way to back into an understanding of “belonging” and “legacy.” The intent was to give students “an opportunity to think about and define belonging in their own words,” Matthews says. “‘Belonging’ is a higher-level concept that I think everyone feels at a certain point in their life, but it can be difficult to articulate. We’ve flipped the script a little bit. We’ve tried not to use any of those words around ‘belonging’ or ‘legacy’ and have couched the project in the framework of storytelling.” 

“Storytelling is a really powerful, practical frame,” Matthews says. In sharing his own story, he adds, “I’m saying something about myself, my own identity, but I’m also putting something out into the atmosphere that other people can think about, find inspiration from, can be excited about or might find humor in.”

Immordino-Yang underlines the importance of storytelling practice for students, explaining that “telling meaningful stories, teaching somebody else something with your story, formulating a story and a narrative, deciding what, why and how you want to show your story—you can get other people to understand something, but you’re also learning to understand it better yourself.” The ultimate goal of the program is to help students “leverage their experiences for good, so that they can both heal themselves and change the world for the better,” she says. 

Storytelling through films also had an appeal beyond simply teaching new media skills to high schoolers. Cinematic form has its own specific grammar that students can learn, explore and experiment with. It’s a different kind of storytelling from writing personal essays, for example, and can be an exciting new form of visual expression. 

Immordino-Yang and Matthews found an ideal partner in Da Vinci RISE because of the schools’ “explicit, very strategic focus on building community,” says Immordino-Yang. “We chose to work with them specifically because they work on things like social justice, restorative practices, identity, community building, values, beliefs and understanding narratives. All of those things are essentially transcendent ways of thinking about the world.” 

Part of the curriculum development was also creating a safe space for students to share their personal lives. “The weekly lessons began with fun communal exercises, playing with the feelings of being together, collaborating, cooperating and noticing each other,” says Immordino-Yang. They were also tasked with interviewing USC students on campus to practice their communication skills, as well as recording video journals to spur the self-reflection process and become comfortable with speaking and sharing in a video format. 

“Telling meaningful stories, teaching somebody else something with your story, formulating a story and a narrative, deciding what, why and how you want to show your story—you can get other people to understand something, but you’re also learning to understand it better yourself.” —Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

 

While Immordino-Yang and Matthews designed the Belonging as Legacy program, they recruited USC Rossier doctoral student Esther Govea to be the hands-on coordinator week to week, with assistance from Trey Dyson, a USC undergraduate majoring in creative writing with a minor in cinematic arts. Dyson helped with the technical mechanics of teaching video design, including storyboarding and editing. Da Vinci RISE English teacher Jimmy Castaneda also accompanied the students to campus and provided mentorship and support throughout the process. 

Govea, who is pursuing a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership at USC Rossier, is also a professor at California State University, Northridge, in child and adolescent development. Brought in to help facilitate classroom conversations, her goal was “to take the conversation from a surface level to a little bit deeper,” she says. 

Belonging in the classroom is a concept that aligns with her own research on educational disparities among first-generation students of color and is an issue that she’s experienced in her own academic life. “Having gone through undergrad as a first-generation [student], being in classes as one of the few Latina women, being the only person from California in my master’s program, and as a faculty of color, I’m constantly thinking about belonging and how can I make students in my courses feel like they belong—not necessarily just in my class, but at this institution, in higher education,” Govea says. 

“The fact that we’re teaching these students that their voice matters, their story matters and that others can learn from their story,” Govea says, “is very crucial and important.”

Act II: A journey toward belonging

The culminating film festival may have been the time to celebrate the experience and share their stories on a grander scale, but the true lasting power of the Belonging as Legacy program is, as the saying goes, in the journey, not the destination. It’s the relationships, new experiences and challenging conversations that make for the kind of social growth that has the real capacity to make a difference in these students’ futures, as proven in Immordino-Yang’s research. This idea was also reflected in the personal reflections of the participants and instructors.

Castaneda, the Da Vinci RISE English teacher, was thrilled that the Belonging as Legacy curriculum lined up with the personal narrative and memoir assignments from his own class, and that the program could be an extension of that work, teaching his students how to “present publicly, analyze, discuss and collaborate,” he says. He also watched his students take to the environment, in which everyone, including the instructors, shared their histories and personal stories. Through watching videos about racial and social injustice, as well as exercises such as sharing their “Four H’s” (history, heartaches, heroes and hopes), each student was able to open up more and more. 

“So many of the students had this conflicted definition of legacy, but as we were talking about it and wrestling with the idea, you could see how the positivity started to manifest,” Castaneda says. “They realized that they’re the masters of their own fate. Whatever happened in the past happened, but there are still chances for them to create that legacy, whatever it means for them.” 

Dyson, the program assistant, believes that the topics covered in the workshop about racial and social justice hit home for everyone in the classroom because “everyone in the class is a person of color.” It’s been a positive personal experience for Dyson as well. “We’ve been having some really wonderful conversations,” he says. “I’m very grateful for the experience.” Over the course of the semester, Dyson says, it was gratifying to see “the camaraderie, getting a better sense of who they are over time. It’s not just about the program; it’s also getting to know these teenagers, getting to eat with them, talk with them and relax with them.”

“It’s really a way of not just changing education, but also of changing science. We’re trying to change the way that scientists understand and study the nature of human development.” —Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Each week, the students and instructors met in Waite Phillips Hall and then had lunch on the USC campus, mingling with students or visiting the campus bookstore. So much of the program’s success has to do with the logistics, the form that it takes, especially having class weekly on the USC campus, a place known to many of the Da Vinci RISE students who had grown up in the area but where many had never visited.

Belonging as Legacy participant Jade, a senior, lives in the neighborhood and regularly shops at the Target and Trader Joe’s at University Village but had never been on campus until the program. “I had never pictured myself stepping foot in the university,” Jade says. She used to think, “‘I don’t really belong here, I don’t think this is for me.’” Now, she says she feels “like this is something I could do every day. I’ve been thinking about [college] a lot more.”

Castaneda echoes the positive effect that the campus has had on his students’ feeling of belonging in a university setting. “Part of it is how we’ve let the walls down at USC to feel like they belong here, that they can be here one day,” he says. “A lot of them have had those side conversations with me or at school where they say, ‘Even though the school’s in my backyard, I’ve never been there. I’ve never visited.’ It was almost like it was a different planet [for them].” 

Da Vinci RISE senior Alex was open-minded going into the program and eager to explore the USC campus and interact with new people. “I like when people listen, or you hear somebody else’s conversation, you learn a lot about a person,” he says. “Opening up to people opens a lot of gates.”  

Act III: What’s to come

As for what the future holds for the Belonging as Legacy program, Matthews hopes to continue the program at USC, as well as replicate it on the Michigan campus. But there are much larger potential positive effects that stretch beyond simply instituting a program like this on campuses, in both curriculum and research. 

“This work really does change, or at least complicate, how we think about social-emotional learning, how we think about culturally responsive pedagogy,” Matthews says. “We’re honoring student voices, giving them opportunities to display their brilliance and their understanding of various and complex issues. Having research and papers and studies to document that could be a game changer in our field and beyond.” 

Immordino-Yang speaks to this “beyond”—the effects of the program not just on the scholarly field but also on the field of education in general. “We’re finding that practices that promote these ways of being, reciprocating, understanding and acquiring complex perspectives and beliefs are actually powerful for the mind and for the brain,” she says. Programs like Belonging as Legacy are experiments in conceiving of a new kind of developmental science in education, which she calls “deeply, inherently transdisciplinary and inclusive.”

“It’s really a way of not just changing education, but also of changing science,” Immordino-Yang says. “We’re trying to change the way that scientists understand and study the nature of human development.” 

In this moment, it’s clear that the biggest immediate impact on the students is the relationships they’ve formed with each other and with the instructors. Relief and pride shine on their faces after the film festival screening, and many of the students who were too shy to chat just a few weeks earlier stand in front of a rapt audience and answer questions with strong and clear voices. Even the students who struggle with social anxiety put aside their fears to speak about their stories and experiences, opening up before the audience and bravely sharing details of their life stories and what matters to them. 

“We’re honoring student voices, giving them opportunities to display their brilliance and their understanding of various and complex issues. Having research and papers and studies to document that could be a game changer in our field and beyond.” —Jamaal Sharif Matthews

It’s had an impact on the instructors and architects of Belonging as Legacy as well. Matthews, in town from Michigan for the festival, gives Wolverines T-shirts to some of the student participants before they all head out for one last lunch as a group. Later, Dyson circulates to the group an emotional video tribute of his own, detailing his experience getting to know everyone and how the program impacted him as a USC student assistant. 

This film festival is a remarkable moment to witness, and it’s remarkable to consider how when we share ourselves and our stories, we strengthen our bonds with our communities and further develop our social and emotional selves. As Immordino-Yang’s research reveals, that growth is occurring on a neurological level, underneath the surface, an investment in the future. But it’s also easy to see right in front of us, with the group of young adults who have blossomed in a matter of months and who have found belonging in each other.