UC Davis

Students of color who attend low resource schools face more obstacles because of the systemic barriers toward students of color and toward students who attend low resource schools. This qualitative study aims to explore how academically high achieving students of color overcome obstacles and how these students perceive in-school support. This population was chosen because they provide a unique perspective on the obstacles students with similar demographic backgrounds must overcome to achieve academic success. These participants are considered success stories; however, this does not diminish the obstacles they overcame, especially if the obstacles are systemic. Learning how these students perceive in-school support is informative of how schools can support students of color who attend low resource schools in ways that they feel supported and cared for. Seven semi-structured interviews were conducted (via Zoom, due to the COVID pandemic) to learn about the participants’ lived experiences and insights into how they overcome their obstacles. They also shared their experiences with in-school support such as teachers, counselors, and college preparatory programs. Phenomenological variant ecological systems theory (PVEST; Spencer et al., 1997) was used to understand the participants’ lived experiences and how they perceived in-school support. This framework provided a way to understand how participants made sense of their experiences with in-school support and used that as the foundation for how they utilize in-school support with future obstacles. Four themes emerged from the findings during the data analysis: systemic discriminations, the academic resilience narrative, types of in-school support participants utilized, and meaning-making of in-school support. These findings showed that the education system needs to remove systemic barriers that hinder students’ academic success, and the narrative of academic resilience is still extant in the education system. Most of the barriers listed by the participants can be remedied within the education system to create a more inclusive and supportive education system for students regardless of race or socioeconomic status.

Keywords: students of color, in-school support, phenomenological variant ecological systems theory, academic resilience