Fighting for Desired Versions of a Future Self: How Young Women Negotiated STEM-Related Identities in the Discursive Landscape of Educational Opportunity

Abstract

In this article, we investigate how the national imperative to increase opportunities for young women of color in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and to broaden their participation was taken up locally at two high schools in one school district. Using ethnographic and longitudinal data, we focus on four young women of color (two at each school) as they negotiated STEM-related identities in the discursive and practice contexts of their lives at school. Using Holland and Lave’s concept of history in person, we view the young women as fighting for particular versions of a future self while entangled in discursive and social relations that threatened to position them differently than they wished to be. We 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). Implications of these findings are discussed.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Lois Weis and her colleagues at the University of Buffalo who collaborated with us on the larger project on which this article is based and to other members of our team at the University of Colorado Boulder. We additionally want to thank Sara Heredia, Bill Penuel, Ben Kirshner, and Heidi Carlone for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. Furthermore, we are incredibly grateful to the reviewers whose suggestions helped improve this article.

Funding

This article is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹ Certainly the students dealt with historical discourses and institutional arrangements outside of school as well. In this article, we focus on the school context related to STEM. For more on outside-of-school contexts, see Bricker and Bell (2014) and Zimmerman (2012).

² All names of schools and students are pseudonyms.

³ Our data and analysis allowed us to investigate changes in the schools and the focal students over time; however, a discussion of these changes is beyond the scope of this article. For a discussion of these topics, see Eisenhart and Allen (2016).

⁴ We were not able to independently verify her numbers.

⁵ Southside went through a principal change during the second year of our study (the students’ third/junior year of high school). The principal during Year 1 of our study had instituted the significant changes at the school. The principal who replaced him had worked at the school, including as an assistant principal, for many years and seemed to be committed to these changes.

⁶ TRIO is a set of eight federally supported programs that assist low-income and disadvantaged students with academics and college readiness.

⁷ AVID is a national program in the United States that was developed to prepare underrepresented and first-generation students for college through study habits and critical thinking skills. AVID is taken as a school elective.

Additional information

Funding

This article is based on research supported by the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.