Racializing Motivation: A Race-Reimaged Framework of Belonging, Emoting, and Achieving Within the STEM Education Context

• In Event: Sociocultural Origins and Processes of Student Motivation: Advancing Theory, Informing Research, and Transforming Practice

Abstract

Objective: To develop a metatheoretical framework for race-reimaging interactions among belonging, emoting, and achieving in STEM educational spaces.

Theoretical Perspectives: We examine how social-cultural-historical factors shape the development and expression of belonging, emoting, and achieving within higher education STEM contexts. To achieve this, we employ various critical approaches to move beyond an intraindividual analysis (e.g., the relationship between mathematics self-efficacy and grades on a mathematics test) and examine how broader social-cultural-historical forces contribute to structural inequities in education. In this work, Critical Race Theory (CRT) serves as the key lens through which we examine the systemic impact of race, racism, and power on racially marginalized groups within the educational context (Bell, 1993; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). For example, we highlight how racism is embedded within the education system and contributes to persistent educational STEM disparities. We demonstrate how race-reimaging interactions among belonging, emoting, and achieving may serve to eliminate some of those disparities.

Modes of Inquiry: This conceptual framework builds on Maehr’s (1974) call to situate motivation within social, cultural, and environmental contexts by extending it to consider racial contexts. Contending that race-neutral approaches are insufficient in understanding the complex realities of racially marginalized students, we advocate for a race-reimaging of key STEM motivation-related constructs and the interactions among those constructs: belonging, emotions, and achievement. Building on Bronfenbrenner’s (1977) ecological systems theory, we propose a systems approach to creating a race-reimaged framework of belonging, emoting, and achievement. This system approach can effectively account for the social-cultural-historical forces at multiple levels (i.e., micro-, meso-, and macro-system) that shape the motivation of racially marginalized students in racialized contexts (Spencer, 2021).

Data Sources: Our framework draws on scholarship from motivation-related areas, including belonging, emoting, achievement, as well as race and racism in STEM higher education. In the paper, we utilize data examining the experiences of African American college students within a predominantly white institution to demonstrate the application of our framework.

Results: We developed the Race-Reimaged Systems Model of Belonging, Emotion, and Achievement to examine the social-historical-cultural influences of race in STEM. This model involves the self-system, immediate context, and social-cultural-historical contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1977; Spencer, 2021). The core self-system centers on the self and well-being, which is affected by factors such as racial identity and critical consciousness. The immediate context entails the role of white and discriminatory educational spaces on racially minoritized students, while the social-cultural-historical contexts entail the white supremacist ideologies about race and achievement. We demonstrate how each system, both independently and interactively, impacts motivation among racialized students. We end our discussion by providing implications for STEM research and STEM education.

Significance: Scholars have race-reimaged constructs in educational psychology in a variety of ways (e.g., belonging, Fong et al. [2019], SDT basic needs, López et al. [2022], utility value, Gray et al. [2020]). Here, we extend race-reimaging approaches to inquiry by also including the interactions among the multiple race-reimaged constructs of belonging, emoting, and achieving.

Authors

• Jessica T. Decuir-Gunby, University of Southern California

• Saba Lily Modaressi, University of Southern California

• Paul A. Schutz, University of Arizona