Date of Award

2022

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education

Abstract

Women with children are one of the growing student sub-populations in higher education. However, the support student mothers receive in colleges and universities has been historically unreliable and their experiences in college have not been studied in depth. This is especially true for student mothers from minoritized backgrounds with differing racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and ability identities. This research aims to understand the experiences Latina graduate student mothers from an ecological and critical perspective. Guided by Critical Human Ecology and Black Feminist Thought, eight open-ended interviews were conducted and analyzed. Themes and categories came out of the patterns in the collected data. The results of this research are shared in form of a composite narrative based on the experiences of student mothers in college. Student mothers use different navigation strategies to cover their needs. They depend on the support of their family, especially women of the family. The aim of this research is to be a resource for the scholastic community that brings to light the inequities in the experiences of minoritized student mothers in college.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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