UC Davis

Existing research on elite universities finds that high school pre-college years are consequential for later educational success, both for middle-class students as well as lower-income students (Jack, 2016). However, far less is known about the pre-college student engagement strategies of community college students. I conducted 80 semi-structured interviews and performed intersectional analyses of community college students’ pre-college experiences of student engagement. My study reveals several key findings that build on existing literature: (1) formative pre-college experiences start as early as the primary schooling years; (2) the strategies teachers use to engage community college students throughout their K–12 schooling may shape the strategies students themselves later develop and deploy to build student-teacher relationships in the community college setting; (3) intersecting with class-oriented and gendered engagement, students of color also experience racialized and racist engagement from teachers and thus face distinct engagement challenges; (4) class-oriented frames of capital acquisition and activation cannot fully account for the racialized and gendered ways that K-12 students experience teacher engagement and, in turn, develop their own engagement strategies. Most importantly, I find that community college students’ K–12 pre-college experiences help them acquire cultural capital, but only when teachers deploy ethnoracial- and gender-validating strategies of engagement. Moreover, when teachers use validation strategies that align with students’ intersecting social locations of race, class, and gender, they foster the development of diverse forms of student agency, including non-conventional, alternative engagement strategies. To help situate my findings, I advance the theory of “controlling histories.” Controlling histories refers to the ways in which historically white racialized ideas of superiority have not only shaped US ethnoracial group trajectories of social acceptance and mobility, but also inscribed these same ethnoracial group trajectories into all facets of US educational institutions, including student-peer and student-teacher relationships. Furthermore, as students’ ethnoracial group histories direct them along their respective pathways, relations of gender and class intersect to complicate the strategies that students engage in their efforts to succeed. Routine ascriptions of historically White racialized ideas of superiority result in narrowly constructed, racialized pathways of student-peer and teacher acceptance. My results show how teachers and students engage strategies that both ascribe to and subvert controlling histories. This research helps us to better understand community college students’ intersectional experiences of peer and teacher engagement during their K–12 pre-college years. Such understanding, in turn, can facilitate diverse, complex, problem-solving strategies and solutions promoting student success in college, such as student-professor and student-peer relationship-building processes that acknowledge and address the intersecting inequalities found in diverse community college student populations and in other postsecondary populations with similar demographics.