– Authors find that their fight for future selves was not—for them—with the national narrative about women of color in STEM but with local school narratives that negatively positioned students of color more broadly and remained silent on issues of gender, the intersection of gender and race, and the implications for STEM.
– High school success in STEM came as a hopeful but potentially fragile byproduct of struggles to differentiate themselves from people like them (other Blacks, Latinas, the poor).
– School discourses emphasized broad academic disparities by race and class, not by gender or STEM.
– Both schools emphasized the need for increased opportunities for students, and both took steps to offer more advanced STEM courses and to encourage students to take them.
– These young people did not portray themselves as engaged in a struggle with a historical discourse about women in STEM. Rather, their struggle was with racial and class discourses at school that positioned them differently than they were or wished to be.
2017 - Fighting for Desired Versions of a Future Self: How Young Women Negotiated STEM-Related Identities in the Discursive Landscape of Educational Opportunity
Allen, Carrie D., & Eisenhart, Margaret
Researchers: Carrie D. AllenMargaret Eisenhart
University Affiliation:
Email: carrie.allen@sri.com
Research Question:
Authors illustrate the local struggles that young women of color at two high schools in the same school district engaged in to construct and maintain STEM-related identities in the context of their high school lives. In particular, authors focus on the local discourses and practices of the school learning environments within and against which four of the young women in the larger study engaged in STEM identity work.
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Journal of the Learning Sciences
Journal Entry: Pp. 1-30
Year: 2017
Findings:
Data Description:
The study described in this article comes from a larger ethnographic and longitudinal study examining high school STEM opportunity structures and students’ figured worlds of STEM in Denver and Buffalo. The ethnographic study focused on the 2010 10th-grade cohort in eight public (noncharter) high schools (four in Denver, four in Buffalo) that were roughly comparable in serving large numbers of students of color and students on free or reduced-price lunch. Students from the cohort were followed for 3 years of high school (2010-2013). In 2013-2015, students from the 2010 10th-grade cohort were followed via online surveys to obtain information about their post-high school experiences. This article focuses on two of the Denver schools.
Theoretical Framework:
Relevance:Intersectionality of race, class, and gender in STEM
Archives: K-16 STEM Abstracts