Stories of Faith and Belonging from Texas Christian University Students
Participants and community members talk about the exhibition photos with Lauren Sierra, Assistant Chaplain and Disciples Campus Minister.
Belonging is a fundamental human need. Feeling like one belongs directly affects health, happiness, and countless other fundamental pursuits. It’s particularly important for college students who are finding their way in the world, students who are often living away from home for the first time in their lives. According to a 2020 study, one’s sense of belonging in their undergraduate years relates to greater “career satisfaction and success, psychological well-being, and community involvement and leadership,” and this is even more true of minority communities. Belonging matters. Yet, many students don’t feel they belong. The American Council on Education found in a 2024 survey that one fourth of all students reported not feeling an overall sense of belonging on campus.
The Office of Religious and Spiritual Life at Texas Christian University (TCU) is working to change this.
Undergraduate students from a variety of religious and cultural backgrounds at TCU collaborated and learned together about belief and belonging on campus in a series of dialogues facilitated by Interfaith Photovoice. During her comments at the opening night of the TCU exhibit, Rev. Lea McCracken (Associate Chaplain and Church Relations Officer) said “Interfaith Photovoice has rerouted how we do interfaith work.”
“Interfaith Photovoice has rerouted how we do interfaith work. ”
Participants shared photos and the stories behind them during a series of small group dialogue sessions this spring. The students — who came from a variety of faith backgrounds — worked together to identify shared experiences, needs, and hopes. Their exhibit opened last week in the Robert Carr Chapel.
The importance of creating spaces of trust and cooperation, such as the ones nurtured by the Office of Religious and & Spiritual Life, emerged as an important theme. One way the students explored this topic was through navigating the bridges and barriers to belonging at TCU. For example, participant Sarah Morgan reflects on a painful email she received detailing an act of vandalism defacing LGBTQ+ material on a bulletin board and how receiving the email made her feel as a person who identifies as queer on campus. This overarching theme is also reflected in the title for the exhibit, You Belong Here: Building a Culture of Belonging on Campus.
The process itself encouraged student participants toward understanding and empathy, learnings they shared with others with their curated photo exhibition. One place this showed up was in senior and Interfaith Fellow Noah Tennent’s photo of a fallen shopping cart from a church event. He brought the photo to represent the chaos of youth ministry, but left with a different understanding of his own photo.
“What’s so cool about photovoice is I actually left with a completely different understanding of the picture,” he reflected at the opening exhibit. “I was asked during the process, ‘when have you felt like the cart?.’ It just stopped me in my tracks.” To his surprise, he realized he had felt like the cart before — when he was overworked and had too much on his plate during his junior year. “The cart fell over and I got burnt out. It took people putting those books in the cart for me and talking to me … that really let me finish [my] mission…”
The participants’ stories show the ways every person has a unique and important story to tell as it relates to their experience with belonging on campus. Find more information about the exhibit here.
Learn more about how to bring Interfaith Photovoice to your school or community by connecting with us.