The United States faces shortages of professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math enterprises, which are complicated by underrepresented minorities facing systemic barriers to their educational and career success. Addressing this, we used social cognitive career theory and critical consciousness to create a program named Poder (Spanish for “to be able to” and “power”). We analyzed interviews from 36 diverse community college students who experienced this 5-week program, which included mentoring and seed funding opportunities as they designed ventures addressing societal problems. Initial findings highlighted themes on how students developed and integrated critical consciousness, entrepreneurship self-efficacy, and technological understanding during Poder. Students displayed high expectations for entrepreneurship careers that leveraged technology to promote social change, as well as high expectations to persist through graduation and/or transfer to a 4-year university.
A need exists to better understand how racial/ethnic minority students' critical consciousness development in response to marginalization may be involved in their educational and career development. We therefore examined the link between critical consciousness development and career decision self‐efficacy and career outcome expectations among racial/ethnic minority community college students. Following social cognitive career theory's conceptual pillars, we developed a testable model integrating critical consciousness and social cognitive variables. This model was tested with 135 racially and ethnically diverse community college students. Data analysis included path analyses and tests of model fit using structural equation modeling. Results suggested that (a) higher critical agency is linked to higher career decision self‐efficacy and outcome expectations and (b) critical action and reflection have a bidirectional link and predict higher critical agency. Implications for research and practice aiming to close educational and career gaps among racial/ethnic minorities are discussed.
This study examined parent-professional decision-making regarding children with disabilities. Structurating activity theory guided the qualitative interpretive analysis of transcripts from 16 meetings regarding special education decisions for students, including 10 meetings in English and 6 meetings in Spanish. Results reveal how professional elements, such as documents, influenced decision-making more than family elements, such as parent knowledge. Interpreters influenced interactions based on their abilities to connect multiple elements of family and professional systems. Decision-making was structurating as participants used and reproduced broad social structures, such as expert power and the authority of policy. Conclusions offer theoretical and practical implications of findings.
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