Fighting for STEM Selves and Futures

• In Event: Nondominant Students Negotiate Histories, Institutions, Figured Worlds, and Identities to “Become Somebody” in STEM

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate how the national imperative to increase opportunities for young women of color in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and to broaden their participation was taken up locally at two high schools in one school district. Drawing on 5 years of ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on a small group of high-achieving young women of color and what it meant for these young women to be STEM-oriented, to be recognized as such, and to author STEM selves across time and space during high school and beyond.

We employed an embedded-case methodology to analyze semi-structured interviews of students, parents, teachers, principals, and school counselors from the students’ sophomore through senior years of high school, as well as surveys from the students’ first two years of college. We developed case displays for each student of critical moments, STEM/academic instantiations, and college/future plans that were organized temporally. These displays allowed us to identify: (1) themes in each student’s authoring of academic and STEM identities over time; and (2) the schooling practices that students engaged in during that time.

Utilizing Holland and Lave’s concept of history-in-person (2001, 2009), we viewed the young women as fighting for particular versions of a future self, while entangled in discursive and social relations that threatened to position them differently than they wished to be. Initially we interpreted the STEM-related successes of these young women as evidence of resisting the historical narrative that positions them as disinterested, unprepared, or unsupported in STEM. In some respects, they did counter this narrative. However, as we began to look more closely at their words and actions over the course of high school and beyond, we came to see that their fight for future selves was not—for them – with the national narrative about STEM, but with local school narratives that negatively positioned students of color more broadly and remained silent on issues of gender, the intersection of gender and race, and the implications for STEM. Ironically, as these young women struggled with race and class bias, they positioned themselves as good in science and especially math that made them eligible (though not necessarily well-prepared) for STEM futures, but in doing so, they drew on and thus reconstituted the narrative they intended to resist. High school success in STEM came as a hopeful but potentially fragile byproduct of struggles to differentiate themselves from people like them (other Blacks, Latinas, the poor).

Dealing with these struggles is how history comes to be lived in persons. The history-in-person approach, in particular, draws attention to multiple, intersecting, and sometimes contradictory struggles that young women of color grapple with as they fight for desired versions of selves and futures. These findings suggest a need for an explicit naming and examination of the “double bind” that young women of color experience as they move through school learning environments and for special support to prepare them for the benefits and challenges they may face in STEM-related college programs or workplaces.

Authors

• Carrie D. Allen, SRI International

• Margaret A. Eisenhart, University of Colorado - Boulder