In this conversation, I’m joined by Zahara Chowdhury - a teacher with 18 years of experience across secondary, further and higher education. She’s the author of Creating Belonging in the Classroom (Bloomsbury) and hosts the podcast School Should Be.
What does belonging actually mean in a classroom and what does it require of us?
Zahara has thought about belonging from the inside out, she writes about this not just as a practitioner but as someone for whom the question is also personal. She is a South Asian Muslim woman who grew up in a system that often asked her to assimilate rather than belong, who was told as a child not to expect too much, and who later had a teacher who told her she could apply to Oxford. Both of those things are in the book. Both of those things matter.
Zahara consistently resists the temptation to make belonging tidy. She’s clear that it isn’t a checklist, isn’t transferable wholesale from one school to another and isn’t a destination. It’s a journey - complex, dimensional and ongoing. And yet the things she comes back to are often quite simple: knowing your community, asking your students how they are, approaching the classroom without judgment.
We also talked about fear, specifically the fear teachers and leaders often feel around EDI topics and the worry of getting it wrong. Zahara’s response to that is both direct and generous: flip it. The fear usually comes from caring, not from indifference. Start there.
Together we explore:
Why Zahara wrote Creating Belonging in the Classroom.
The belonging triangle: representation, connection and voice and what each of these looks like in practice.
Why belonging is not one-size-fits-all and why understanding your community comes before anything else.
What we consistently underestimate, including the power of a smile, a question and being seen without judgment.
Fear, repair and what to do when belonging breaks down in a classroom.
What Zahara wishes more people in education were saying to one another.
Zahara leaves us with this:
What would change if we started seeing teachers as people?
You can connect with Zahara through her blog or her podcast, School Should Be.
Conversations in Education: a space to think together, through honest conversations about education as it is lived, led and felt.
