Anchoring comunidad: how first- and continuing-generation Latinx students in STEM engage community cultural wealth

Critical Incidents for Hispanic Students on the Path to the STEM Doctorate

“…In a phenomenological study that involved interviewing 16 STEM major Hispanic students, results further supported Yosso's notion of the importance of Community Capital Wealth (CCW) (Rincón et al, 2020). In this research they found that secondgeneration college students had access to both traditional cultural capital and CCW, while first-generation college students only have access to CCW.…”

Latinx Students Charting Their Own STEM Pathways: How Community Cultural Wealth Informs Their STEM Identities

“…Through participation in ethnic-based engineering organizations, students activate community cultural wealth (CCW) to establish family-like relationships with peers and resist racial stereotypes (Revelo, 2015; Revelo & Baber, 2018). Further, Latinx students exchange CCW for other forms of capital to support their own and their peers’ persistence in STEM, and utilize their resistant capital to counter messages that center individualism and competition (Rincón, Fernández, & Dueñas, 2020).…”

Curando La Comunidad [Healing the Community]: Community-Centered STEM Identity

“…Our qualitative findings highlight how Latinx students were grounded by community and the ways they engaged community as developing STEM professionals, which serve as the basis for their potential impact as cultural bridges within STEM. Participant narratives demonstrated that their STEM goals, altruistic values, and critical conscientiousness were influenced by family/community members and anchored in cultural pedagogies/practices, family/community histories, and early experiences of community advocacy (López et al, 2019; Rendón et al, 2020; Rincón et al, 2020). Community engagement included reciprocal support from kinship networks and community-based programming.…”

“…Recognizing the influence of community on collectivist and social justice orientations in STEM, a growing body of asset-based research has explored the role of community cultural wealth in STEM (see review in Denton et al, 2020). Rincón et al (2020) found that Latinx students relied on community cultural wealth to resist dominant, individualistic, and institutional forms of capital within STEM. López et al (2019) identified familismo or the strong identification to family through loyalty, responsibility, solidarity, and reciprocity as an enduring and multifaceted cultural practice enacted by Latinx undergraduates in S&E. Rendón et al (2020) also identified service learning, learning communities, and Latinx cultural pedagogies that disrupt individualism within STEM as successful practices for Latinx STEM students.…”