How Do We Make Our Classrooms Feel Like Home to Each and Every Student?

For context, I’m a first-generation Ghanaian American who has spent all but three years of my life living outside of Ghana. While I mostly understand my family’s home language, Twi, I grew up not really being taught the language by my parents. We learned a few Twi words here and there, but English was the main communication medium in our household and every other environment we found ourselves in. 

Growing up in the United States, I felt like an outsider.  I thought those feelings would change when I moved to Ghana at 12 years old and lived there for 3 years. Even while living there, I felt like an outsider. 

I’ve never been a clean fit in any of my worlds. I’ve always been different. I’ve lived my whole life outside the margins of the dominant culture. In more ways than one, I’ve received harmful messages and mistreatment to remind me of that reality. The following traumatic scenario, which I’ve played out in my mind for the last 10 years, is a prime example of this predicament.

Okay, let me set the stage.

Imagine yourself on an airplane that is heading to the Kotoka International Airport in Accra, Ghana. As the plane makes its descent toward the airport, your anxiety heightens because you know the course of events that are about to follow. The minute you get off the plane, you know you’ll have to go straight to the immigration booth, meaning you’ll have to hand over your American passport to a Ghanaian immigration officer for visa inspection. What I’ve mentioned thus far is standard protocol, but this is where things take a left turn. So you hand your American passport over to the immigration officer, he turns to your bio page and discovers your name, “Kwame Karikari Sarfo-Mensah.” For a brief moment, the officer looks at you and then back at your passport. At this moment, you have two options for a response. 

1. Respond to the officer in English, leaving yourself subject to questioning from the officer as to why you have this strong Ghanaian name and are not speaking to them in Twi.
2. Respond to the officer in Twi, leaving yourself subject to ridicule and harsh criticism as to how you could be Ghanaian and not be able to speak Twi fluently.

Unsure of how to respond, you freeze in a panic because you know what will happen next. The officer will either call you an oburoni and crack jokes about you with their co-workers nearby or look at you in disgust and shame you for not being able to speak Twi fluently.

While this story is specific to my experience, I can assure you that others who grew up as third-culture kids or immigrant students have dealt with a similar scenario to the one I just described. 

Whether you teach abroad in an international school or in a K-12 school within the United States, chances are you’ll have a few students within your classroom who are struggling to make sense of their identities or searching for spaces where they feel welcomed, accepted, and fully embraced for who they are—a space where no one is interrogating them or invalidating their lived experience.

These students I’m referring to are your multilingual students, students with IEPs and 504 plans, immigrant and migrant students, neurodiverse students, students who are disabled, students who practice non-Christian faiths, students who are BIPOC, students who are LGBTQ+, etc. Although they may enter your classroom with vastly different lived experiences, there are two things they all have in common:

1. They find themselves outside the margins of the dominant culture.
2. They all deserve to be in a classroom that feels like HOME.

Understanding that every student defines home differently, how can we make our classrooms feel like home for every student? We can start by thinking about our homes. When we’re in our home:

1. we feel a sense of psychological and emotional safety and comfort
2. we can express ourselves unapologetically
3. we receive support and care from loved ones
4. we belong and feel welcomed, valued, and accepted
5. we thrive off of routine and stability 
6. we’re connecting intimately with our loved ones
7. cherished memories and family history are held near and dear to our hearts

Regardless of who we are and where we come from, we all want to experience such a home environment. 

We deserve that feeling because it’s a human right recognized by the United Nations. In this world where government officials across the globe are shutting down DEI programs, censoring and banning culturally responsive and identity-affirming curricula in schools, and pushing anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, it is imperative for us, as educators, to create classroom spaces of inclusion and belonging that feel like home for our most vulnerable students.

We may not be able to solve all the world’s problems, but there are a few key things we can do to make our students feel comfortable in our classrooms:

• Pronouncing student names correctly
• Using correct gender pronouns for students
• Incorporating translanguaging practices in our daily instruction
• Recognizing and honoring non-Christian holidays
• Adopting a restorative approach to discipline and relationship-building
• Understanding that social-emotional learning must be done with an antibias, antiracist (ABAR) lens.
• Planning lessons and employing instructional techniques that account for the learning styles of neurodiverse learners.
• Making our classrooms more accessible to students with physical disabilities

In the end, no student should ever feel the way I felt during my childhood. By making our classrooms feel like home for our students, we’re committing ourselves to normalizing and embracing the beauty of difference, as informed by the intersectional nature of our respective identities. Finally, we’re committing ourselves to building learning spaces where joy, love, and acceptance are living parts of our classroom culture.