WHAT'S CULTURE GOT TO DO WITH IT? AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE INDIVIDUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL FACTORS THAT SUPPORT UNDERREPRESENTED MINORITY AND FIRST-GENERATION WOMEN GRADUATE STUDENTS' SUCCESS IN STEM FIELDS

Abstract

This qualitative research study applies feminist standpoint theory and community cultural wealth to investigate the individual and institutional factors that underrepresented minority and first-generation women graduate students report as having contributed to their gaining access to and navigating through their graduate STEM degree programs. Through the presentation of five women graduate students’ testimonios, this study offers the women participants an opportunity to provide a counternarrative in their own voices to the prevailing deficit lens with which education literature views them. This study highlights the ways in which the assets from the women’s community cultural wealth, although overlooked by their graduate institution, are instrumental to their success. In addition, this study asks the women participants to share their perceptions of the institutional resources and services available to them and evaluate their utility in supporting them. The women’s narratives are testimonios to their experiences as underrepresented minority and first-generation women graduate students in STEM fields. The findings both provide a counternarrative to the deficit literature on underrepresented minority and first-generation women students in STEM fields and add to the literature that uses Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth as a conceptual framework by expanding its application to other underrepresented populations in the United States and to advanced, highly technical STEM fields. Additionally, the findings have implications for educational practice and further research: they suggest that universities need to better understand the multiple aspects of students’ individual cultures and reconfigure their campus and STEM classroom cultures in ways that are structured by and reflective of students’ community cultural wealth