ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors discuss the importance of building a safe, welcoming, and inclusive middle school environment as young adolescents are in a deep search for self-integral part to the middle school years. They consider the role of creating students' sense of self and belonging as a vital component of a safe, welcoming, and inclusive school environment. The authors provide strategies for creating spaces in which middle schoolers see their identity represented both within the school curriculum and in the larger social systems of schools and culture. They also discuss what they are calling excavation and extension, the critical dual processes through which identity in these crucial in-between years begins to coalesce. The authors look for evidence of the dual processes of excavation and extension, and notice how the systems of representation at school affected middle school students, their developing sense of self, and their belonging in school communities.
