Identity & Self-Belief

This is our challenge: how can we help students change their perceptions of themselves, build their confidence, and enable students to see themselves as successful learners, well-equipped to return to government schools? How do we ensure our teachers are building our students’ sense of self-belief and sending a clear message that all children can learn?  

The Identity & Self-Belief element of the Luminos Method describes how we address these challenges by building self-belief among our students, helping to ensure that they can succeed within our program, and even more importantly, when they return to government schools and beyond. It also discusses some of the tensions and challenges related to these topics.

We believe that by valuing their cultures, providing opportunities for students to experience academic success, and highlighting role models from similar backgrounds, students can dramatically change how they view themselves and their own potential. As students start to experience small successes in their learning, their self-belief and motivation grows, in turn leading to further achievements.

Key Messages

We support students to build belief in their own potential and to develop conceptions of themselves as successful learners by:

• Valuing students’ cultures so they feel accepted in their classrooms
• Enabling students to frequently experience academic success, encouragement, and praise
• Highlighting role models from similar backgrounds. 

This webpage includes an overview of our work in this area. For more detailed information, recommendations based on our experiences, and a discussion of some of the tensions and challenges involved, you can download this document.

I. Valuing Students’ Cultures

For many of our students, formal school culture can seem quite unfamiliar. Whether it’s using a different language or establishing different norms around behavior, students can have the impression that their way of being in their home life is somehow less valuable. This can send the message that to be successful at school would require a shift in the students’ identity and an adoption of a different kind of culture. In our programs we strive to reject this model, aiming for an environment where children feel that their identities are valued and accepted.

We seek to show the value and respect we have for local cultures and communities by:

• Partnering with the community from the beginning of the program
  • Working to understand their needs from the outset
  • Getting their inputs on the school calendar and timetable 
  • Involving them in teacher recruitment 
• Valuing students’ languages
  • Hiring teachers from students’ communities, who can speak their language 
  • Using the students’ home language in school to:
    • Clarify the lesson content 
    • Capture students’ attention with familiar songs and games
• Learning from community members
  • Inviting family and community members into school to share about their occupations 
  • Giving students projects and homework that involves students talking to community members
• Using culturally relevant materials and methods
  • Integrating locally created texts into our structured phonics program
  • Using familiar local materials in lessons
  • Using traditional games
  • Empowering teachers to contribute their knowledge to shape the program

To learn more about how we work to ensure students feel their culture and identity is valued, along with tips and lessons learned, download the full PDF!

II. Enabling Success

We do this by: 

• Focusing on foundational literacy and numeracy so students can frequently experience success 
  • Moving in small steps to ensure students master the essential skills 
  • Providing plenty of opportunities to review and practice new skills with familiar activities
  • Setting achievable targets and regularly assessing students to highlight their progress
• Utilizing pedagogy that empowers students and builds confidence
  • Encourage participation, asking and answering questions, and group tasks where students can support one another
  • Provide frequent opportunities for review and reflection so students recognize how much they have learned
  • Promote responsibility and leadership
• Sharing students’ successes with their families
  • Regular family engagement group meetings with demonstrations and presentations from students

Building Confidence Through Play

Students in the Luminos program have multiple opportunities every day to practice new skills they are learning in playful, non-threatening ways which build their confidence, as seen in this example documented by Dr. Susan Rauchwerk from Lesley University: 

“Kkalama helps the other children in her group draw the hop-scotch spaces using only multiples of three as the teacher instructed. She hums the counting song she learned yesterday and tosses her rock which lands on the number 12. She hops while her group excitedly shouts 3, 6, 9, 12! Firew, the student recorder, asks how many spaces it took to get to 12. Together they count 4, and Firew scratches 3×4=12 in the dirt. Simhal is next, it lands on 21, and they start the process over. In the distance Kkalama hears her brother Abush count 5, 10, 15, 20 as he jumps rope with another group across the yard. She helped him practice at home last night, will he make it to 100?”

Dr. Susan Rauchwerk, Learning Through Play

To learn more about how we ensure our students are able to experience success, along with tips and lessons learned, download the full PDF!

III. Highlighting Role Models

IV. Identity & Self-Belief Essentials

Our mission is not just to ensure that students are able to succeed during the Luminos program, we need to build their belief in themselves so that they continue to excel in government schools and beyond. We do this by:

1. Valuing local cultures 

• Making school feel like an accepting environment, one that values the child’s cultural identity rather than seeking to change it
• For students who have previously attended government schools, and may have found that formal school culture alienating, this can be very powerful

All of these elements contribute to increased self-belief, and this increased self-belief in turn supports further successes and a virtuous circle that can continue throughout the students’ school career and beyond. 

Footnotes & References

[1] Self-efficacy, that is the belief one’s own capability to attain a specific outcome (Bandura, 1977; 1986; 1997), is correlated with greater levels of effort and perseverance (Klassen & Usher, 2010). Differences in self-efficacy can help to explain why two students of similar cognitive ability can have very different academic outcomes (Pajares, 1997; Klassen & Usher, 2010).

[2] Pajares, 1997.

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Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W H Freeman/Times Books/ Henry Holt & Co.

Pajares, F. (1997). Current directions in self-efficacy research. Advances in Motivation and Achievement, 10(149), 1-49.

Klassen, R. M., & Usher, E. L. (2010). Self-efficacy in educational settings: Recent research and emerging directions. in Karabenick, S., & Urdan, T. C. (Eds.). (2010). Decade Ahead: Theoretical Perspectives on Motivation and Achievement. Emerald Group Publishing.