Undergraduate research experiences can have a positive impact on student retention and success in STEM, but are not widely available to community college students. Yet, the role of community colleges in producing STEM graduates, especially Latinx students, is overlooked and likely underestimated. A program designed to attract and retain Latinx…

Developing an engineering identity is crucial for students pursuing an engineering degree. Community college students may experience greater difficulty building and maintaining engineering identities than their peers at 4-year universities. The purpose of the present study is to examine how socioeconomic status (SES) and the S-STEM scholarship, a…

Objective: Given funding concerns and heightened work expectations at baccalaureate degree-granting community colleges, we set out to understand faculty advisors' emotional labor in such context. Methods: We conducted a supra analysis, which is a form of secondary analysis of qualitative data. Existing interview data were drawn from a…

This dissertation conducts a narrative positioning analysis of full-time two-year college literacy teaching (TYLT) faculty in order to investigate how they perform professional identities through storytelling. The author analyzes narratives surrounding three significant facets of professions: professionalization, jurisdiction, and uses of…

Nursing is an old vocation but is relatively new to the academy, with schools of nursing being established in Western universities in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their establishment was presaged by earlier moves of the preparation of pre-registration nurses from apprenticeships served in hospitals to tertiary education…

Learning assistance services offered by U.S. community colleges are vital to the academic success of many students, but the tutors themselves remain understudied. This paper attempts to narrow both the research and recognition gaps by exploring and categorizing prominent aspects of professional community college tutors. Using a small-scale,…

A review of studies published between 2000 and 2017 was conducted to understand students' engineering identity and their financial need within the community college setting. The review found that research studies used a variety of frameworks and methodologies to investigate community college engineering identity and financial need. In addition,…

Burnout has become a prevalent issue in workplace environments, significantly affecting individuals' mental, emotional, social, and physical well-being. This qualitative phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of burnout among community college counselors in Southern California, a group often overlooked in existing research. While…

Black women administrators should be included in the discourse around experiences in leadership on their campuses, understanding these experiences will shed light not only on how to develop and retain this group, but also on these additional needs of this group. The experience of Black women administrators is a topic that has not been studied…

This study examined the experiences of faculty members who transitioned into the role of department chair at community colleges in the United States. While there is research on faculty transitioning into department chair roles at four-year colleges and universities, there is very little research on this transition within community college…

While women have made great strides in leadership and academia over the last several decades, women continue to lag behind men in executive leadership positions. In universities, women students are vastly underrepresented in executive leadership roles; however, at community colleges the trends are reversed as women are actively taking on executive…

Academic work in universities is in flux with staff increasingly being confronted with multiple and conflicting roles, often leading to academics experiencing feelings of fragmentation and despair. Though much has been written about the changing nature of academic work and its effects on the academic workforce, there has been less exploration of…

The purpose of this study is to understand how community college faculty make meaning of their experiences with grants in order to expand their professional identity as Principal Investigators (PIs) and co-Principal Investigators (co-PIs). Extramural funding provides resources to community colleges that supplement support for teaching and…

This qualitative research study explored how the lifelong narrative identities of women educational leaders within the context of power structures have shaped the leaders they are today. Through narrative inquiry methodology and theoretical frameworks of narrative identity and feminist poststructuralism, six executive-level women leaders in the…

This case study examined how participating in a formal leadership development program impacted the development of leader identity for community college leaders. An examination of the program curriculum and materials, program facilitator interviews, participant surveys, focus groups, individual participant interviews, and participants' program…