Belonging — It’s More Than a Word at Saint Mary’s

For Saint Mary’s Professor of Psychology Bettina Spencer, belonging is the foundation of flourishing. To that end, she designed a new course titled Belonging, which she’s teaching for the first time this semester.

Belonging was developed under the Signature Course Fellowship Program through the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. The Signature Course program is a cohort of scholars from across disciplines in higher education who are building and launching their own grant-funded courses, each of which seek to address a pressing question regarding human flourishing. 

Spencer became a fellow in the Signature Course program in 2024, one of only 15 professors from the United States and Great Britain accepted into this cohort. Each professor teaches their course at their own institution. In addition to Belonging, others course topics include Borders: Migration, Ethnic Identity, and Human Flourishing in an Increasingly Diverse U.S. Society; Social Media and Wellbeing, Systemic Racism and Modes of Resilience, and Public Health and Human Flourishing. 

With this fellowship, Spencer will teach Belonging three times over the next three years to the tri-campus community. The inaugural class is composed of 30 students, all from Saint Mary’s.

“The goal of this fellowship is to create Signature Courses, which ideally will become larger courses that can be scaled-up, or taught online through open access,” Spencer said. “This is a course people in general could benefit from, because so much suffering comes from people feeling isolated or alienated. The opposite of that is flourishing and belonging.” 

“Belonging and community are foundational to Saint Mary's mission; the core values include community,” said Karen Chambers, Dean of Student Academic Services. “To be a part of a community is to feel like you belong in it. We want our students to have as many ways into that feeling of belonging as possible across all the divisions of the College. Professor Spencer's class is an academic examination of what it means to belong and how that is felt by people in different contexts.”  

In preparing the Belonging course content, Spencer and Angelina Stupak ’26 spent a four-week, summer-in-residence at the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. “My role was to assist her in her research and simultaneously, I was attending lectures on ethics and philosophy with fellow interns," said Stupak. “We spent those four weeks doing research together, and identifying different documentaries that we could use to supplement the course.” Stupak, who graduates in May with degrees in sociology and criminology, is one of three teaching assistants Spencer hired for the course. 

“Belonging has become the core of my own life mission. This is one of the most important human needs that we long for,” Stupak said. “When you look at belonging through that lens, it's so much easier to approach people with empathy and understanding. At Saint Mary's, I've gotten to experience belonging in a special way.” 

Together, Spencer and Stupak chose documentary filmmaking as their vehicle for teaching belonging. “The goal was to have something that students are contributing to together, something that's public and visible,” said Spencer. “These students are doing advanced work, they're learning advanced topics that you typically learn in graduate school. I believed they could do it, and now I'm teaching this to students, some of whom are first-year students. I keep raising the bar, because I know they can do it.”