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Abstract

The newly recognized phenomenon of Internalized Social Exclusion (ISE) is changing the understanding of the educational mission with regard to social education. Responding to a lack of a clear conceptual framework, I juxtapose ISE with factual and even perceived social exclusion to establish its distinct theoretical boundaries. Corresponding to the three dimensions of ISE – self-perception, contextual-cognitive, and integrative – I describe how the phenomenon manifests in socially excluding emotions, namely embarrassment, insecurity, and otherness. I further examine how these theoretical lenses alter the understanding of learning motivation of marginalized students and consider the possible educational responses to this shifted understanding. Suggested strategies to counter ISE include (1) curricular immersion, (2) cognitive-emotional restructuring, and (3) volitional and strategic empowerment. Finally, I envision the methodologies for future empirical validation of the proposed conceptual framework.

Keywords

social exclusion adolescent psychology belonging disadvantage in education educational equity educational psychology identities social psychology wellbeing motivation

Introduction

Various authors position student learning motivation as one of the most important factors influencing academic success (Sypré et al., 2022; Wardani et al., 2020). However, the trends in learning motivation suggest it to be a pressing issue due to declining rates of student engagement and career aspirations requiring an academic degree (Gaspard et al., 2016; Vedder-Weiss & Fortus, 2011). After a substantial amount of research made in this field, many authors have offered explanations of the student motivation problem and suggestions for dealing with it. Among others, student social exclusion has been named as a factor responsible for this situation (Morinaj et al., 2020).

Recently, research on youth social exclusion has begun to explore the internalization of the phenomenon (Benbow et al., 2018; Clear et al., 2021; de Moor et al., 2018; Rudert & Greifeneder, 2016; Yolaç & Meriç, 2020). Contrasting to factual (measurable) and perceived (interpreted) exclusion, Internalized Social Exclusion (ISE) has been newly identified by Bytautas and Daukilas (2024). It encompasses ‘individual's attitudes towards themself and the social environment that have the potential to bring about or aggravate relational issues, such as inadequate participation, lack of social integration, and lack of power, resulting in the weakened sense of belonging’ (Bytautas & Daukilas, 2024, p. 3). It develops as a result of factual and perceived exclusion but, through socially excluding emotions, is also the cause of it.

The research on student emotions in relation to learning motivation has mostly explored the emotions that arise from engaging with academic subjects (Tan et al., 2021). Pekrun et al. (2002) have introduced a term for them, i.e., academic emotions. However, socially excluding emotions have a completely different foundation, as they arise regardless of the engagement with academic subjects but nevertheless have a motivational outcome (Bytautas & Daukilas, 2024). Even though both types of emotions may coexist, socially excluding emotions provide a better explanation of school alienation and self-isolation (Hascher & Hadjar, 2018).

While growing attention is being given to perceived exclusion (e.g., relative deprivation, social pain, perceived relational devaluation, perceived ostracism, sense of belonging), ISE remains poorly established both in the theoretical and the usage sense. The purpose of this theoretical paper is to provide theoretical argumentation for Internalized Social Exclusion (ISE) and to envisage future empirical research and educational practice possibilities regarding ISE and associated emotions. Therefore, I raise the following research questions:

How do socially excluding emotions explain the relationship between factual social exclusion and decreased learning motivation?

What would be the possible educational response to socially excluding emotions?

The Concept of Socially Excluding Emotions

A number of authors stress that social inclusion/exclusion has a psychological nature (Prince & Hadwin, 2013; Qvortrup & Qvortrup, 2018). A person may seem included at numeric (being physically included) and even social (being socially active) levels but still not consider themself to be recognized by the community, i.e., lack the sense of belonging (Qvortrup & Qvortrup, 2018). Baumeister and Leary (1995, p. 506) described the sense of belonging as ‘the extent to which individuals feel personally accepted, respected, included, and supported by others in their social environment’.

However, I argue that considering the subjectivity involved in the assessment of the social exclusion situation as a separate level is not accurate. In fact, the subjectivity is omnipresent and inseparable from the facticity of the situation. Therefore, in examining exclusion I propose to distinguish between two interdependent layers of reality: the factual (observable, measurable) and the perceived (interpreted). The factual layer encompasses every detail that can be outwardly observed or measured throughout numeric and social levels. On the other hand, the perceived layer should be understood as a first-person subjectivity added to each and every aspect of the social world. The perceived layer describes the reality as it is interpreted.

Having established the proper significance of perceived social reality, I take one step further and reconsider the active denial part in the concept of exclusion. Until this point, I was discussing social exclusion as if there was a clear distinction between the subject (the excluded) and the social context. Nevertheless, exclusion is part of the subject as much as it is part of the context. Therefore, it follows that exclusion happens also when the subject denies themself the possibility of social belonging.

This note requires reconsidering the prevailing conceptual frameworks of social exclusion. Whether we distinguish social exclusion in three levels – numeric, social, and psychological (Qvortrup & Qvortrup, 2018) – or in two layers – factual and perceived – we fail to encompass the idea of self-exclusion. Building on the work of Bytautas and Daukilas (2024), I argue that the concept of Internalized Social Exclusion (ISE) allows exactly that – explaining the actions that the excluded individuals take that only aggravate the exclusion situation. Therefore, ISE should be understood as an enduring psychological state rather than a level or a layer of social exclusion (Table 1). It is the cumulative effect of repeated perceptions of exclusion.

Table 1.

Comparison Between the Two Layers of Social Exclusion and ISE (Adapted from Bytautas & Daukilas, 2024; Jehoel-Gijsbers & Vrooman, 2007).

Manifestation of Exclusion	Nature of the Phenomenon	Dimensions of Exclusion	Example in Educational Context
Layers
Factual	Objective situation	Distributional	A student does not participate in a field trip due to material deprivation
Factual	Objective situation	Relational	Classmates explicitly avoid groupwork with a specific student
Perceived	Interpretation	Distributional	The parents refuse to buy their child a trending toy or a piece of clothing
		Relational	In groupwork, classmates turn down an idea of a specific student
ISE
ISE	Attributions and cognitive restructuring	Self-perception	A student decides that they are faulty
		Contextual- cognitive	A student decides that their classmates are stupid
		Integrative	A student decides that they are simply in the wrong environment

To illustrate ISE with an example from a published empirical study, I will borrow the findings of Benbow et al. (2018). The authors described the internalized consequences of social exclusion, based on their interviews with 26 homeless mothers. The participants found it difficult to integrate into society, feeling the internalized blame of being not-good-enough mothers. Interestingly, having found themselves in an unfavorable and undesirable social situation, these mothers continued to reinforce their marginalizing beliefs, treating other homeless mothers as ‘worse-off’, despite this way preventing themselves from meaningful social connections and a sense of belonging.

The mothers’ self-imposed exclusion offers a critical illustration of how a sense of belonging functions. Research on the sense of belonging suggests that it is an emotional response to perceived social inclusion (Osterman, 2023). The facticity of an experience or a situation does not result in an emotional response directly, rather it is mediated by the subjective interpretation of it (Danvers et al., 2023). One might argue that attributing reasons for lacking a sense of belonging can be either healthy or not. ISE would then be associated with unhealthy attributions, that tend to aggravate factual social exclusion, becoming an enduring psychological state as the excluded individual makes generalizations of those unhealthy attributions and internalizes them over time.

In addition, ISE offers a novel viewpoint of the mechanism involved in obtaining a sense of belonging. As we know, ISE is experienced through the interpretations of self, environment, and their interaction (Bytautas & Daukilas, 2024). We might deduce that a sense of belonging is felt when all three of these interpretations are positive. Yet, we must be mindful that this is not an ‘all or nothing’ phenomenon; a person may feel embarrassed about themselves but still perceive their social environment as supportive. The reverse is also true. It seems, then, that the interpretation of the interaction between self and environment is the most crucial factor affecting the sense of belonging. The work of Wilde (2022) provides a powerful illustration of this internal struggle. In her exploration of people with psychological trauma, Wilde shows how a person's interpretation of their social interaction can be so warped that, even in favorable social conditions, they may simply not accept that others are ‘humans, who also…’ This suggests a deep, ungrounded internal narrative that is a key component of ISE.

As Bytautas and Daukilas (2024) describe, the interpretations of self, environment, and their interaction are linked to very specific emotions. These emotions are embarrassment, insecurity, and otherness, which Bytautas and Daukilas (2024) name as socially excluding emotions. It makes sense to call them this way, because they are the reason why a person may willingly choose to exclude themself from the social environment. But the question is how these emotions and interpretations come about. According to Galán-Arroyo et al. (2023), the factual experiences of social exclusion are closely related to a subject's self-concept, but the direction of causality is reciprocal. That means that factual social exclusion partly influences the interpretations of self, environment, and their interaction, therefore, bringing about corresponding emotions. Unfortunately, these emotions, by affecting behavior (Table 2), further influence the experienced social exclusion, and a person is caught in what Galán-Arroyo et al. (2023) call a ‘vicious circle’.

Table 2.

Reactions to Socially Excluding Emotions and Their Explanatory Cognitions (Adapted from Bytautas & Daukilas, 2024; Williams, 2007).

Reactions and Cognitions	Embarrassment	Insecurity	Otherness
Primary Cognitions	‘Something's wrong with me’	‘Something's wrong with them’	‘I don’t belong here’
Avoidant Reactions	Hiding oneself	Avoiding agency	Keeping others at a distance
Reactive Cognitions (Avoidant)	‘I don’t want others to learn I’m flawed’	‘Better not to mess with them’	‘I mustn’t forget who I am’
Overcompensating Reactions	Embracing an ‘outcast’ persona	Being openly hostile to others	Creating a fantasy world
Reactive Cognitions (Overcompensating)	‘You can’t make me feel ashamed’	‘I’ll show you who's superior’	‘I don’t need them; my life is separate’

Learning Motivation Explained by Internalized Social Exclusion

In defining learning motivation authors from various schools-of-thought usually include four main dimensions: competence, relatedness, autonomy, and value (Filgona et al., 2020). The first three dimensions correspond to the principal components of self-determination theory (Ryan & Deci, 2020). Only the last one – value (or interest) – is complementary.

Drawing from these dimensions we understand that for a learner to be motivated, they should feel (1) able to complete the necessary tasks, (2) belonging to the social environment of the educational setting, (3) an active agent in the curriculum, and (4) personally attached to the curriculum or its outcomes. The presence of at least one of these sensations is a prerequisite for learning motivation and achieving more is associated with higher levels of motivation. However, it is important for our article to emphasize that each of these sensations is observed as an emotional response rather than a rational deduction.

Here I would like to remind that a person experiencing ISE often perceives their own personality as inferior, flawed, or even shameful, and their social environment as unsafe, unjust, or incongruous with their personality. These interpretations undeniably have influence on the four dimensions of learning motivation. This echoes with the current state of social sciences research, that has time and again proved social exclusion to be related to lower levels of learning motivation (Bruin et al., 2023; Evans & Niemeyer, 2005; Fante et al., 2021; Morinaj et al., 2020; Stenseng et al., 2014; Twenge et al., 2002). Using the lens of ISE, I will now discuss the possible explanations for how perceived social exclusion hinders learning motivation. I will begin by providing arguments for the avoidant reactions to socially excluding emotions.

First of all, the feeling of competence is denied as the marginalized person unconsciously looks for confirmations of their inferiority (Oxman-Martinez et al., 2012). Secondly, a person experiencing ISE may have a strong psychological distinction between themself and the social environment, evaluating each social encounter with suspicion. They live in constant alertness, believing that a friend may turn into an enemy momentarily. So, even when the socially excluded person is awarded all favorable conditions to achieve relatedness, they refuse it, blaming someone else (E. Cuadrado et al., 2021). Moreover, a person experiencing ISE may get used to their passive role in building their own life and may not even wish autonomy (Baumeister et al., 2005). I will deal with the dimension of value later on.

The overcompensating reactions to socially excluding feelings, however different may seem, share the same foundation as the avoidant ones. They too arise when an individual feels embarrassed, insecure, and/or not-fitting-in. Not accepting their flaws learning the curriculum, a person experiencing ISE may choose to seek competence elsewhere. This situation has been widely recognized in the deviant and counterproductive academic behavior literature (D. Cuadrado et al., 2020; Uceda-Maza & Domínguez Alonso, 2017). Seeking relatedness, a person experiencing socially excluding emotions may practice manipulative or ingratiating behaviors that are not consistent with the curriculum (Inzlicht et al., 2015). They may seek attention and praise even at the expense of participating in the curriculum (Dewall & Richman, 2011). Desiring to be an active agent in the curriculum, such a person may start disregarding the directions of the teacher, i.e., refusing their help and struggling alone or, hopefully, hiring an extracurricular tutor (Graça et al., 2013).

One might argue that a person experiencing ISE may just as well be highly motivated to perform academic tasks, because it allows avoiding social interactions or even coping with low academic self-esteem. That is possible. However, I believe that it is unlikely, due to the fourth dimension of learning motivation, that of value. Learning motivation theory suggests that motivation partially comes from interest in the curriculum. But someone experiencing socially excluding emotions is unlikely to be interested in ‘living a regular life’. Instead, the very nature of socially excluding emotions implies constant inner struggle with regard to own social value and survival in the social environment. The dimension of value seems to be the key factor determining the seriousness of the ISE situation.

The study of Doolaard et al. (2022) offers a strong starting point for understanding how the perception of an exclusionary context can impair learning motivation. These authors performed correlational and experimental studies regarding exposure to information about the prevalence of sexism. While acknowledging the detrimental effect of gender inequality in society on girls’ self-concept, Doolaard et al. (2022) nevertheless had doubts about whether increased perception of gender inequality has any positive psychosocial effects. Unfortunately, these researchers observed a clear link between awareness of the prevalence of sexism and experienced social exclusion. Even more alarming was the finding that such exposure reduced the girls’ carrier motivation.

A powerful, real-world narrative demonstrating the psychological mechanism of a similar motivational effect is found in the study of West (2002). Her immersive, longitudinal study on a third-grade student named Mack, who had an extremely low social status in his class, serves as a perfect example of ISE in a real pedagogical context. The author describes an incident when a classmate spoke to Mack in a “mean-spirited tone” and refused to help him. Following the incident, the researcher asked Mack about the situation, hoping to hear more about how he perceived it, as well as his emotional response. Instead, the researcher was given an uninterested neutral response: ‘I don’t know. . . I’m used to it.’ This profound shift from momentary emotion to an accepted internal status directly led to a breakdown in his learning motivation. According to West (2002), Mack ‘soon developed the frequent habit of not seeking help but finding ways to do the best he could without it, and his intrinsic motivation to do his best and seek meaning weakened’ (p. 214). Mack would boast about how much he has read, falsifying his reading log. All that, to avoid unwanted helpful attention from the teacher.

Pedagogical Approaches to Promoting Student Learning Motivation in the Face of Internalized Social Exclusion

Research in student motivation has been exploring success factors for a while now. Recent interventions have associated such success with the adaptation of democratic classroom leadership style, interactive game-based learning and assessment, augmented reality, adaptive learning and mobile learning technologies, peer-tutoring, maker education approach among many others (Adedigba & Sulaiman, 2020; Halim et al., 2020; Jia et al., 2021; Jong, 2020; Leonardou et al., 2020; Martí Arnándiz et al., 2022; Moltudal et al., 2020; Yousef, 2021). However different these and other approaches may be, they all seem to have one thing in common – they engage students to explore the curriculum in an active way.

However, engaging someone who experiences socially excluding emotions to actively explore the curriculum is a difficult task. In addition to seeking factual inclusion in the classroom, I offer three considerations for teaching strategies in classrooms with students who experience ISE: (1) shifting the focus from the social realm to the curriculum, (2) normalizing socially excluding emotions, and (3) guiding students to develop conscious determination and willpower (Table 3). The first strategy, curricular immersion, is aimed at achieving flow states where self-awareness is temporarily let go off. Conversely, the strategies of cognitive-emotional restructuring and volitional and strategic empowerment focus on the development of internal psychological tools and raising awareness about ISE both to the excluded students and their classmates. I argue that due to its internalized nature ISE should primarily be addressed by measures targeting internal rather than external obstacles. As research suggests, positive cognitive attribution retraining, which underlies these internal shifts, is indeed an achievable goal (Bosnjak et al., 2017; Graham & Taylor, 2022).

Table 3.

Proposed Strategies for Enhancing Learning Motivation of Students Experiencing ISE.

Strategy	Rationale	Examples
Curricular immersion (helping students direct their attention away from social monitoring and toward active learning activities)	This strategy works to redirect student attention toward their academic work by creating flow states. The approach aims to stop students from constantly monitoring their social environment through activities that promote deep learning engagement.	Interactive game-based learning (Fernando & Premadasa, 2024) where technology is applied to create interactive situations that require students to respond quickly without social interaction. Maker education or task-based learning (Jia et al., 2021; Musengimana et al., 2022) where students’ motivation is piqued by real-world problems distracting them from their self-consciousness and social concerns.
Cognitive-emotional restructuring (normalizing failure and cultivating self-compassionate attributions)	This strategy helps students develop a new internal monologue about social belonging and failure by teaching self-compassion principles. The approach directly tackles the development of negative perceptions related to ISE.	Raising awareness of socially excluding emotions where students would be taught that social exclusion experiences are universal and do not indicate personal flaws. Teaching self-compassion (Maratos et al., 2024) which helps students learn new positive attributions.
Volitional and strategic empowerment (helping students build their willpower and resilience)	This approach helps students improve their ability to persist despite the expected discomfort. It focuses on helping students develop intentional actions, helping them resist their self-excluding tendencies.	Teaching resilience (Naidu, 2021) which is useful in any life situation. Mentoring (Andersen & West, 2021) that could help students develop an action plan for gradual inclusion.

Let us consider the impact of socially excluding emotions on the value aspect of motivation. Since the excluded students tend to place value on social recognition and survival, shifting this focus to the curriculum seems to be the wise thing to do. However, even employing immersive and interactive learning strategies the success will be limited because excluded students develop interest in learning material reluctantly (Riddle et al., 2024). I propose to address this problem by implementing ISE-sensitive social education. According to Byrd (2012), social education involves teaching students about society's structures, promoting understanding of justice, and fostering critical thinking about social issues. This allows the teacher to show recognition of students’ socially excluding emotions and offers a foundation for the student-teacher sense of belonging (Brownlee et al., 2022).

The platform of social education permits addressing the existential questions of socially excluded students in a non-exclusionary way, without person-centered interventions. Levitan and Johnson (2020) described the importance of presenting culturally grounded curriculum when working with students from marginalized groups. In a similar sense, ISE-sensitive social education can be viewed as psychologically grounded curriculum. Social education becomes a counterbalance to the academic curriculum, and this way prepares the socially excluded student for the shift of focus.

By presenting that socially excluding emotions are relevant to all, a teacher will be in good conscience because it is indeed so. As Qvortrup and Qvortrup (2015, 2018) building on the work of Schroer (2008) argue, an individual is always somewhere in the continuum between inclusion and exclusion. Total inclusion signifies total de-individuation and is therefore not a preferred outcome of social education. Instead, an inner struggle of inclusion-exclusion and its associated emotions are an existential human characteristic.

The layer of perceived social exclusion does not always present itself in factual social exclusion. Rather, as shown before, it is more related to emotional and behavioral outcomes. For this reason, I propose considering each student as potentially experiencing ISE.

In the twenty-first century, factual social exclusion has become hardly tolerable by the standards of society. Justice is often seen as an overriding goal in almost every aspect of societal functioning. This includes education, where teachers are expected to create all the favorable conditions for students to experience inclusion (Brownlee et al., 2022; McGuire & Meadan, 2022; Thorjussen, 2020). Without undermining inclusion initiatives, I would like to question the attitude of ‘social inclusion provision’. I believe that the role of the teacher is not to stop at removing factual obstacles to inclusion, but to guide students to develop conscious determination and willpower. The teacher should not mislead students by simplifying social experiences, but rather be a mentor when students make important life decisions (Daukilas et al., 2023).

Future Research

This article proposes to consider social exclusion as a subject-context-interdependent problem and argues for a shift in focus toward ISE mechanisms.

Future research should focus on refining the measurement and understanding of ISE:

Factual vs. Perceived Social Exclusion: Further examine the relationship between factual and perceived social exclusion in relation to self-constructs like self-concept and self-esteem.

Qualitative Research: Due to the subjective and sensitive nature of ISE, there is potential in research using qualitative methodologies (e.g., phenomenological or case studies) to obtain contextualized reasoning and rich data on the experiences of excluded individuals.

I propose that future researchers perform empirical testing of the three intervention strategies developed in this article. The effectiveness of these strategies should be evaluated using rigorous experimental design or randomized controlled trials across different educational settings.

Curricular immersion: Research should investigate whether this strategy (e.g., through maker education) successfully reduces the levels of social anxiety. Specifically, studies should test the hypothesis that intense curricular engagement serves as an attention-regulation technique that temporarily reduces the cognitive load dedicated to social monitoring and self-conscious thought patterns.

Cognitive-emotional restructuring: Studies should validate the effectiveness of this strategy in achieving a shift in causal attributions. Research must test the efficacy of explicitly teaching self-compassion principles to help students move from internalized negative attributions to more adaptive attributions.

Volitional and Strategic Empowerment: Despite a growing body of research on teacher-to-pupil mentoring, there is a gap of literature regarding mentoring in the context of ISE. Research is needed to measure the development and long-term transferability of the internal psychological tools fostered by this strategy.

Conclusions

Social exclusion has often been associated with reduced learning motivation. Yet, the relationship between these two phenomena is complicated: the direction of causality is uncertain, and even the correlation varies widely across studies. In this article, I offer a theoretical framework to explain these patterns. Instead of focusing on the identification of factual social exclusion, I suggest considering its internalization. Internalized Social Exclusion seems to be the mediating factor that explains learning motivation outcomes. Manifesting in socially excluding emotions (embarrassment, insecurity, and otherness), Internalized Social Exclusion explains individual differences in how social exclusion experiences are perceived. Consequently, taking into consideration the psychological factors of students when addressing the issue of social exclusion, regular strategies for arousing learning motivation are of limited value. While not neglecting initiatives of factual inclusion, I propose three distinct strategies and provide reasoning for them. They are curricular immersion, cognitive-emotional restructuring, and volitional and strategic empowerment. It lies in future research to assess the efficacy of them.

ORCID

Marius Bytautas https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7024-1913

Footnotes

Author Contribution(s)

Marius Bytautas: Conceptualization; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Validation; Visualization; Writing – original draft; Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Data Availability Statement

No data were collected.

Author Biography

Marius Bytautas is a PhD student in Vytautas Magnus University. In his work, he focuses on topics of moral and character education, social exclusion and sexuality education.

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Beyond Perceived Exclusion: A Theory of Internalized Social Exclusion in Schools

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

The Concept of Socially Excluding Emotions

Learning Motivation Explained by Internalized Social Exclusion

Pedagogical Approaches to Promoting Student Learning Motivation in the Face of Internalized Social Exclusion

Future Research

Conclusions

ORCID

Footnotes

Author Contribution(s)

Funding

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Data Availability Statement

Author Biography

References