Julie R. Posselt’s research while affiliated with University of Southern California and other places

Increasing the representation of racially minoritized groups and women in STEM graduate education is insufficient to make STEM fields and academia inclusive and equitable spaces, where all feel supported and thrive. This study was motivated by a phenomenological examination of support for graduate students, focusing on programs that admitted and graduated higher proportions of underrepresented students than their fields. We used negative case analysis to document the interplay of interpersonal and institutional interactions that define what racially/gender minoritized students experience as unsupportive. Guided by an intersectional interpretation of structuration, we uncovered three mechanisms—withholding support, doing racialized and/or gendered harm, and neglecting to take action when students faced known threats/harm—that underlie the unsupportive experiences faced by graduate students of color and women in STEM doctoral education. This typology of unsupportive mechanisms, alongside an understanding of positive types of support, can help practitioners and scholars rethink what constitutes support, moving toward creating equitable and inclusive graduate education.

Despite a growing body of research on the outcomes of holistic admissions and eliminating standardized test score requirements throughout education, few have documented how organizations transition to holistic review. Implementation, however, may help explain variation in impacts of holistic admissions. This article draws upon theories of organizational routines to examine adoption of holistic review in 13 STEM PhD programs from five universities. We conducted 60- to 90-min interviews with admissions leaders, including a COVID-19 transcript review activity. Data reveal change is multilevel, involving new policy/structural, practice/cultural, and cognitive/interpretive routines, which carry promise for disrupting institutionalized inequities where the politics of changing these routines can be managed. We discuss implications for policy, organizational practice, and future research on academic evaluations.

There is growing awareness that established structures of higher education are often predicated on problematic assumptions about merit, excellence, and rigor. Doctoral qualifying exams, for example, are required to advance to candidacy in many Ph.D. programs despite decades of documented concerns about the implications of standard modes for student equity and well-being. As more Ph.D. programs move to reform these exams and candidacy requirements, it is important to understand how Ph.D. programs, as academic organizations, construct the significance of the qualifying exam. A sociocultural lens suggests qualifying exams and the learning that enables their passage are symbolic rituals that move doctoral students from legitimate peripheral participation toward full membership and belonging in academic communities of practice. We conducted a comparative case study to understand how two Ph.D. programs in the physical sciences that have reformed their candidacy requirements—one elite and one middle ranked but striving for respect—constructed the significance and purpose of their qualifying exam and the broader transition to candidacy. Our inquiry included the contexts and mechanisms that mediated student learning. Through interviews with faculty, staff, and students, we found that the Ph.D. programs’ recognition of their status within their respective disciplines emerged as a crucial component in constructions about the significance of exams and candidacy. The middle-ranked Ph.D. program changed the exam and candidacy structure to reflect legitimate practices in their discipline. The elite Ph.D. program created multiple pathways toward candidacy to mitigate long-standing concerns about gender equity and student well-being. Despite the structural changes, the Ph.D. programs left intact cultural understandings of merit, excellence, and rigor that maintain inequity in doctoral socialization. Our findings suggest that researchers and practitioners should pay more attention to designing and implementing structures that facilitate faculty assessments of doctoral student learning.

Undergraduate education in the U.S. is racially/ethnically stratified, and there is limited mobility for Black and Latinx BS recipients in STEM majors into the PhD programs from which faculty hiring disproportionately occurs. Bridge programs are proliferating as a means of increasing minoritized students' enrollment in STEM graduate programs, but little social science examines mechanisms of their impact or how impacts depend on the graduate programs to which students seek access. This sequential mixed-methods study of the Cal-Bridge program analyzed trust networks and mechanisms of relational trust as factors in graduate school application, admissions, and enrollment decisions. First, using social network analysis, we examined patterns in the graduate programs to which seven cohorts of Cal-Bridge scholars applied, were admitted, and chose to enroll. Then, we conducted an in-depth case study of the organization in the Cal-Bridge network with the highest centrality: University of California, Irvine's physics and astronomy PhD program. We find the positive admission and enrollment outcomes at UC Irvine were due to intentional, institutional change at multiple organizational levels. Change efforts complemented the activities of the Cal-Bridge program, creating conditions that cultivated lived experiences of mutual, relational trust between bridge scholars and their faculty advisors and mentors. Findings illustrate mechanisms and antecedents of trust in the transition to graduate education. We use these findings to propose a framework that may inform the design of future research and practical efforts to account for the role of trust in inequities and creating more equitable cultures in STEM.

Developing leaders for a diverse democracy is an increasingly important aim of higher education and social justice is ever more a goal of leadership education efforts. Accordingly, it is important to explore how dominant leadership models, as blueprints for student leadership development, account for and may unwittingly reinforce systems of domination, like racism. This critical discourse analysis, rooted in racialization and color-evasiveness, examines three prominent college student leadership development models to examine how leaders and leadership are racialized. We find that all three leadership texts frame leaders and leadership in color-evasive ways. Specifically, the texts’ discourses reveal three mechanisms for evading race in leadership: focusing on individual identities, emphasizing universality, and centering collaboration. Implications for race in leadership development, the social construction of leadership more broadly, and future scholarship are discussed.

Community-based research models hold potential to change that conducts geoscience research, its relevance to the public, and may begin to address historical injustices. However, this potential is contingent on such projects being led in ways that meaningfully and equitably bridge the worlds of scientists and community stakeholders. Here, we present an in-depth, comparative case study of leadership in two place-based, community-based projects funded through an NSF initiative. Primarily focusing on two Principal Investigators, we draw data from participant interviews, journal entries, and project observations over fourteen months. One project is centered at an urban watercress farm in Hawai’i and one is centered on the Los Angeles River in California. We use theories of symbolic boundaries and methods of comparative case study to identify leadership practices that facilitate successful place-based, community-based research involving scientists and members of historically excluded communities. We find boundary-spanning leadership to include a critical awareness of scientific history, efforts to center community at all phases of the work, and trust-building practices that build trust. This work carries theoretical implications for geoscientists working across politicized differences, practical implications for leadership development, and structural implications for the incentives and design of community-based scholarship. We hypothesize community-based science could increase the perceived social and cultural relevance of geosciences, and thereby broaden participation and reduce inequities in who contributes knowledge to these fields.

Background/Context Education scholars have examined how state policy and informal practice can widen or reproduce racial and gender inequalities in graduate education. Just one empirical study, which focused on psychology programs, has identified organizational practice that supports recruitment and retention of graduate students of color. Focus of Study To identify organizational conditions and specific activities that support diversity in STEM graduate programs, the authors conducted a yearlong case study of a physics program that, for the last decade, has trained about 10% of the Black Ph.D.s in physics, nationally. They identified and described concrete efforts to enhance access and inclusion, and sought to understand how this program distinguished itself from a traditional physics department. Participants Study participants consisted of 16 faculty, administrators, administrative staff, and students affiliated with the Applied Physics program at the University of Michigan. Research Design Data for this qualitative case study was collected through eighteen interviews, two student focus groups, observations of everyday life and special events in the program, and a large amount of documentary data. Guided by the constant comparative method, the analysis assessed convergence and divergence across types of data and across faculty, administrator, staff, and student perspectives. Major findings represent four areas of consensus across participant roles. Findings/Results Four themes explain how Applied Physics has increased access to and inclusion in a field known for its inequality. The program institutionalized a flexible, interdisciplinary intellectual paradigm; they reconceputalized their vision of the ideal student and reformed admissions accordingly; they empowered administrative staff to serve as cultural translators across racial and faculty-student boundaries; and they worked to create a familylike climate that gave them a competitive advantage over other physics programs. Conclusions/Recommendations We interpret the findings from the perspective of Charles Tilly's boundary change mechanisms, and conclude that the common thread among the four themes was the program's willingness to erase, relocate, and/or deactivate boundaries that had implicitly created barriers to access and inclusion for underrepresented students. The paper recommends specific steps that graduate programs can take to analyze the symbolic boundaries operating in their own programs, and invites scholars to utilize the boundaries perspective in future research on educational inequality.

The lack of diversity in physics and astronomy PhD programmes is well known but has not improved despite decades of efforts. PhD bridge programmes provide an asset-based model to help overcome the societal and disciplinary obstacles to improving access and inclusion for students from underrepresented groups and are beginning to show some success. We describe several well-known PhD bridge programmes in the United States and discuss lessons learned from their experiences. Many of these lessons can be extended more broadly to physics and astronomy PhD programmes to increase access, diversity and inclusion.