Belonging, Staying, Making It Better: Students Create Space for Their Conceptualization of Community

• In Event: 60.065 - Decentering Dominant Discourses and Reimagining Privileged Spaces in STEM Education

Abstract

Objectives
Located within a university’s College of Engineering, the Strive Program was designed to provide opportunities for students who are underrepresented in the field. The purpose of our study was to partner with students in the Strive Program as they conceptualized creating a space for student voice and organizing within the program.

Theoretical Framework
We used “resistance research” (Cruz, 2011) as well as aspects of participatory action research (PAR). PAR positions youth as “experts about their own lives” (Kirshner, 2010), acts on “issues of racial and social justice” (Kirshner, 2010), and favors consensus-based, “participatory procedures” (Stringer, 1996). Cruz (2011) talked about resistance researchers as moving “away from the radical othering that often happens in social science research” (p. 547). In our work, PAR answered this call to resist the “othering” of research, in that “community-based research seeks to develop and maintain social and personal interactions that are nonexploitative and enhance the social and emotional lives of all people who participate” (Stringer, 1996, p.25).

Methods
Through a semester of ethnographic fieldwork within the program, we noticed that a space for student voice appeared to be a missing component of the program. Simultaneously, students identified the need for voice within the program and we formed a partnership around this goal. We designed our study based on a PAR framework. The participants included seven freshmen, all were Students of Color. We met regularly and recorded and transcribed our conversations. Two students facilitated our meetings and acted as leaders in this partnership, and we conducted interviews with them. Students used us as a sounding board to articulate their feelings about the program and the goals of the student group.

Findings
Students conceptualized a complex definition of community rooted in a critical understanding which included an awareness of positioning within structures, a belief that members take action to improve the community, and an understanding that community was imperative for people with non-dominant identities to succeed in institutions. Students experienced a tension between their conceptualization of community and the structure of the Strive Program, which had rigid grade requirements causing them to retake classes, costing them time, money, and morale. Students envisioned a space for student voice within the program in order to directly counter the tension. We collaborated to create a student group to open up the structure of the program so that it would embody their conceptualization of community.

Significance
The students envisioned the student group as an integral part of programs designed to support and retain underrepresented students in higher education institutions, and understood their work a potential model for the nation. They felt that a space for student voice would allow programs to incorporate students’ skills and experiences in a way that would value students beyond grades and test scores. Additionally, there is a need for researching from a PAR approach in higher education institutions and for research on post-secondary programs designed for underrepresented students.

Authors

• Ashley Seidel Potvin, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Rebecca G Kaplan, University of Colorado - Boulder