Thinking About Student Support in Higher Education Through the Lens of Intersectional Invisibility

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 9:50 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Counternarratives to Enhance Supportive Educational Environments (Table 10)

Abstract

In higher education, well-executed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs are crucial to meet students’ needs and help produce better outcomes. Current DEI initiatives and efforts focus mostly on visible identity markers such as race and gender [1], [2]. Research exploring the complexity of student identities and experiences in relation to social structures can help reconceive existing single identity-focused diversity support approaches as researchers have noted the nuanced ways students’ intersectional identities can be overlooked or unsupported by university systems [3], [4]. In this conceptual piece, we discuss the psychological concept of intersectional invisibility [5] in the engineering context by utilizing a single student’s interviews from a larger project to suggest implications from theory for diversity support.

Authors

• Maimuna Begum Kali, Florida International University

• Stephen D. Secules, University of New Mexico

• Cassandra McCall, Utah State University