Transforming Hispanic Serving Institutions through Student Voice

• In Event: Participatory Action Research Projects at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: Co-creating HSI-PAR to Foster Servingness and Community-Centered Transformation

Abstract

The California State University (CSU) system, which enrolls 42% of Latine undergraduates, continues to see gaps in four- and six-year graduation rates between white and Latine students. This systemic failure requires a critical investigation into how institutions can better facilitate Latine student success.

Utilizing a participatory action, mixed methods approach, this project examined how Latine students perceive their four-year Northern CSU-HSI as serving them, how they define student success, and how institutional elements and the campus environment can better serve them. This project created an opportunity for the CSU-HSI to examine institutional elements and their organizational identity to move beyond Latine-enrolling to Latine-serving (Garcia, 2018) and identified promising changes that can transform the institution. Greater understanding of those structures and environments that support student success from the perspective of Latine students themselves is needed, a notion reinforced in previous work by Garcia (2016) who identified students as co-creators of knowledge as a core component of an HSI identity.

Two cohorts of Latine student co-researchers (n = 15) initially engaged in a workshop on taking photos, ethics, and how photos would be used as a data source to answer the research questions. Following this session, co-researchers engaged in cycles of photo documentation and critical discussion sessions using the SHOWeD method (Wang, 2006) to examine photos, engage in pile-sorting, and collectively code themes arising from photographs. This process resulted in five major themes: (1) Seeing us beyond our identity as students; (2) Greater representation is needed; (3) Discrimination and lack of connection on campus; (4) Culture around mental health; (5) Empowerment and agency. Utilizing these themes, students created a survey to examine how the themes generalize to the larger Latine student body. Survey data was collected in the spring 2023 semester and 342 Latine undergraduate students completed the survey.

Examination of survey findings reveals anxieties that arose in response to academics. Student respondents were asked to rate their agreement with the phrase, “I am overwhelmed” and on average, student respondents feel overwhelmed (M = 3.03, SD = 1.75). On a positive note, despite the numbers of students feeling overwhelmed, when asked to respond with their agreement to the phrase, “Sacramento State prioritizes my mental health at the same level of my academics,” we see that on average, student respondents feel that Sacramento State prioritizes their mental health at the same level as their academics (M = 3.53, SD = 1.90).​ Recommendations include a greater examination of the impact of student success initiatives on student mental health. The institution should also intentionally create mental health programming that is culturally responsive for the Latine community.

Our findings suggest that an HSI designation does not de facto result in culturally-affirming institutions that serve Latine students. By engaging students, we incorporate their lived experiences directly into our understanding of how institutional elements affirm students’ cultural and racial ways of knowing to support them and their communities. Findings and implications for policy will be presented.

Authors

• Amber Michelle Gonzalez, California State University - Sacramento

• Kevin Ferreira van Leer, University of Connecticut