Affirmations From “Home”: The Role of Relational Counterspaces in the Success of Underrepresented Minority Undergraduates in STEM
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2022
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Swarthmore College. Dept. of Educational Studies
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en
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Full copyright to this work is retained by the student author. It may only be used for non-commercial, research, and educational purposes. All other uses are restricted.
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Abstract
Why Study Persistence and Attrition in Underrepresented Minorities in College Biology?
When I took my first steps on campus as a freshman, I had no intention of majoring in education at all. I had never seriously considered education as a field of study or as a career I could pursue, but as a product of an inner-city public school system, the aspect of education I had always been attuned to was the inequity in the experiences of students like myself compared to the students of the suburban public schools and the private schools, many of whom would be my classmates in college. When I got to my first STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) course at Swarthmore, it was glaringly obvious that I would spend the next 4 years being “one of the only” in more ways than one. As a Black, non-male, low-income student of biology, I naturally found myself asking why there were so few people who shared my identities in the courses and the department as a whole. As I processed hearing many of my Black femme peers express that the intro biology courses had killed their joy for the subject and watching some drop the courses and change their academic trajectories, I also found myself balancing my own love for the subject and the reality that, honestly speaking, biology at Swarthmore was not treating me well. It felt like I was always struggling—struggling to understand, struggling to be seen, and ultimately failing to see the justification of my struggle. We could all agree, my friends and I, that things were harder than they should be and we weren’t to blame. My decision to pursue biology and education was born of my desire to approach what was clearly a systemic issue from a critical pedagogical perspective. What was it about the structure, the content, the landscape of college biology, Swarthmore biology in particular, that made so many underrepresented students feel the same way?