As a mother, daughter, and educator in Compton, California, the author writes a letter as an episolary offering/love letter for adjunct professors. The author offers these brief words as an act of gratitude, as an act of daily survival, and as an act of abundant defiance against the elimination of Women of Color (WoC) adjunct professors, writers,…

The academic literature suggests that the experiences of women and faculty of color are differentiated and have more complexity than other groups; however, the specific elements of the academic environment that create or perpetuate these experiences with regard to barriers are not widely explored. This study surveyed 60 tenured and tenure-track…

The increased diversity of students at community colleges makes support and retention of Black women instructional faculty critical. Black women instructional faculty may feel like imposters, receiving messages of inadequacy, despite their achievements. If so, such feelings may impede their ability to serve students and to thrive more generally in…

This paper examines the narratives/oral histories of three Latina teachers to help us understand how they negotiated and navigated their identity formation. We explore how they consciously constructed (Lee, 2013, p. 7) their professional identities, which are inextricably linked to their personal identities and their life stories or the "set…

Minority students are suspended at a disproportionately higher rate compared with others. To reduce racial suspension gaps, four California school districts banned schools from suspending students for willful defiance, a category consisting of relatively minor disruptive offenses. I evaluate the impact of these policies on high school student…

In the 2012 essay, "The Girls from Compton Go to College," the authors analyzed how growing up in Compton, California, impacted their identity development as scholars, teachers, and activists. In this article, the authors build on their previous work, utilizing a similar reflexive process to delve more deeply into how cultural capital…

What was the role of imperfect local information in the growth, gender gap, and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) major selection of early 20th century American universities? In order to examine pre-1950 American higher education, this study constructs four rich panel datasets covering most students, high school teachers, and…

In this article, a junior faculty member explores her obsessions with the distribution of time in the areas of teaching, scholarship, service and personal life through an intensive analysis of an academic calendar, populated with data points in those areas. Through this analysis, she examines her first year and her own development as an academic.

This article documents how the authors, two Chicana tenured professors from immigrant and working-class backgrounds, drew upon their graduate school experiences as resources for navigating the tenure track. They discuss lessons learned not in the official classroom but in other spaces inhabited by women of color. Such lessons included: networking…

During the 2014 White House Science Fair, President Barack Obama used a sports metaphor to explain why we must address the shortage of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly in the engineering and computing fields: "Half our team, we're not even putting on the field. We've got to change those…

During the 2014 White House Science Fair, President Barack Obama used a sports metaphor to explain why we must address the shortage of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), particularly in the engineering and computing fields: "Half our team, we're not even putting on the field. We've got to change those…

The article presents a theoretical framework, "institutional phase theory", that charts the process by which higher education faculties in the USA were broadened by race, gender, and to a certain extent class over the past 40 years. Drawing upon institutional ethnographies of three very different universities--a top-ranked private…

This mixed-methods research study examined the effects on the career preparation, advancement, and enhancement of women from California community college leadership who participated in the Asilomar Leadership Skills Seminar (Asilomar) from 2005-2011. Data were collected during the 2011-2012 academic year and were gathered from the results of 67…

The statistics on Latinas who hold positions as professors and leaders in higher education are grim. Although there are more Latinas going to college, only 1% of professors in the U.S. are Latina. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore the lived experiences of 4 Latina professors to learn about their journeys to secure positions…

This study focuses on how a Chicana/Latina professor contributed to the development of social consciousness with Spanish bilingual credential candidates in a Teacher Education Multiple Subject Credential Program, in California, USA. As a teacher educator, my goals were to look deeply at my teaching approach and to evaluate what the students and I…