Theorizing and Realizing: Student Success Practitioners in Black, Rural Communities

• In Event: Blackness and Being: How Four Black Women Doctorates Shape Public HBCU Research

Abstract

Presenter 3 is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Indiana University Bloomington in the Center for Postsecondary Research and a Research Fellow at UNCF’s Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute (FDPRI). Before beginning her doctoral studies, she earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Elementary Education and was a 2nd-grade teacher. Her research centers college access practitioners who work in Black, rural contexts and the implications of rurality on the nature of college access work. She is attuned to discourses, socio-political phenomena, and micro-politics that affect the intersections of race and rurality within boundary-spanning student success networks. She gleans from professional experiences in higher education, elementary education, community outreach, federal government, and non-profit arenas to engage in and inform her work.


There are three components to Presenter 3’s presentation. The first component entails an overview of a grounded theory study that she conducted on student success practices in Black, rural communities. The objective of this is to highlight the understudied and undertheorized relationship between postsecondary educational efforts, Black people, and Black, rural places. Using critical realism (Bhaskar, 1989; 2010) as a conceptional framework for advancing critical grounded theory methods, she grapples with how practitioners support students. Data from the study includes one-on-one interviews with student success practitioners within a southern state context. Findings offer a theory for practitioners to use while directly supporting Black, rural students. This is significant to the field as a racialized theory of this kind and in this context had yet to be constructed, prior to her work.



The second component of Presenter 3’s presentation will focus on the relationship between her dissertation study and one of FDPRI’s reports, which she co-authored, that centers rural students and institutional supports at HBCUs. The objective of this is to show how the presentation of rural knowledge and data evolved with respect to audience, purpose, methods, and institutional context. The report presented 5 abbreviated case studies of HBCUs engaging in rural-centered work, which offered more in-depth discussion of place and its variations than the previous grounded theory study. Findings showcased HBCUs’ abilities to support rural students through broadly targeted student success practices and policies, and they underscored the role of innovation and imagination as institutional actors continually supported Black, rural students.

The third component of Presenter 3’s presentation will uplift complementary arts-based methods that she engaged in during data collection and analysis phases of individual and collaborative UNCF-FDPRI projects. They include (a) audio recordings of FDPRI team meetings where colleagues extended each other’s understandings of their work and (b) poetic and visual representations of empirical data collected at/with HBCUs and other field sites. This aims to emphasize the role of self- and collective reflection, community-based efforts, and communal support when doing rural-centered work.

Author

• Kamia F Slaughter, Indiana University