The Research That Built My Praxis

A reading list for anyone doing — or beginning — DEI work in STEM education

---

I've worked in STEM education and managed student support programs for over six years now. In the early years, I was led almost entirely by gut instinct — by what I knew, from my own experience as a non-traditional student, that I had needed in order to succeed. I knew belonging mattered. I knew struggle wasn't the same thing as failure. I knew students needed to see themselves reflected in the people mentoring them. But I didn't have the language for any of it, and I definitely didn't have the theory. I just had instinct, and enough conviction to act on it anyway.

The last few years — and especially now that I'm in my second year of my PhD — I've spent a lot of time digging into the scholarship that actually backs those instincts up. It has been genuinely validating to find that so much of what I was doing on gut feeling has decades of theory and research behind it. So this post is what I've uncovered. I want to share it with everyone else who is just starting that same deep dive — trying to put language and theory to the instincts that have already been guiding their practice.

I get asked fairly often — by graduate students, by new faculty, by colleagues stepping into equity work for the first time — where to start. So I want to share the research that has most shaped how I think, teach, and build programs. This isn't an exhaustive literature review. It's closer to a well-worn bookshelf: the texts I return to, teach from, and hand to people who are just beginning this work.

I've organized it into two parts. The first covers foundational scholarship that anyone doing DEI work in education should know, regardless of discipline — the shared canon of the field. The second is specifically for STEM practitioners: the research that grounds the day-to-day work of teaching, advising, and building support programs in science, technology, engineering, and math.

---

Part One: The Foundations for Every DEI Practitioner

This is the scholarship that built the conceptual architecture for how we think about equity in education at all. If you're new to this work, these are the texts that will show up again and again in other people's reference lists — for good reason.

Critical Race Theory in Education: Naming the System

Start here: Crenshaw's work on intersectionality; Ladson-Billings and Tate's foundational CRT-in-education piece; Solórzano and Yosso on counter-storytelling; Yosso's "Whose Culture Has Capital?" and her broader work on community cultural wealth; Delgado Bernal and colleagues on Chicana/Latina feminista pláticas; DeCuir and Dixson on CRT as analytic tool; Adrienne Dixson's edited volume, Critical Race Theory in Education; Delgado and Stefancic's Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

Before anything else, this body of work gave the field a vocabulary for something that used to go unnamed: that inequity in education is not incidental, but structural, and that whose knowledge counts as valuable has always been a political question.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's foundational work on intersectionality remains essential for understanding that race and gender (and other identities) don't operate as separate, additive categories — they interact, and any analysis that treats them separately will miss real experiences of marginalization. Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate's work bringing critical race theory into education scholarship, and Daniel Solórzano and Tara Yosso's development of counter-storytelling as a research method, together established that the lived experience and narrative knowledge of students of color is not anecdotal — it is data, and a legitimate challenge to majoritarian assumptions about whose story gets to count as the "normal" one. Tara Yosso's broader work on student capital — most fully developed in her concept of community cultural wealth — took this further, reframing the assets students of color bring to the classroom — aspirational, familial, social, linguistic, navigational, and resistant capital — as forms of wealth rather than the absence of it. This single reframe, from deficit to asset, is probably the most load-bearing idea in my entire practice. Work by Dolores Delgado Bernal on Chicana/Latina feminista methodology, Jessica DeCuir and Adrienne Dixson on using critical race theory as an analytic tool, and Adrienne Dixson's edited collection gathering the field's core CRT-in-education scholarship all extend this tradition into methods that let researchers actually operationalize these ideas in classrooms and institutions. And if you want the primer that comes before any of this — the text most people read first to understand CRT's legal origins before it ever reached education — that's Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic's Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

Justice, Liberation, and What Education Is For

Start here: Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; Rawls's A Theory of Justice; Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference; bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress; McLaren's overview of critical pedagogy; Kozol's Savage Inequalities; Adams, Bell, and Griffin's Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice.

Every equity practice rests, whether we admit it or not, on some underlying theory of justice. This cluster is where I go to interrogate my own assumptions about fairness.

Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the root this whole cluster grows from — the original argument that education is never neutral, that it either domesticates people into accepting the world as it is or liberates them to remake it, and that real learning happens through dialogue between equals rather than a "banking model" where knowledge is deposited into passive students. Everything hooks and McLaren do below builds directly on Freire's foundation. John Rawls's A Theory of Justice remains the starting point most institutional equity language quietly borrows from — the idea that a just system is one you'd design without knowing which position in it you'd occupy. But Iris Marion Young'sJustice and the Politics of Difference is, for me, the more useful corrective: Young argues that justice can't be reduced to the fair distribution of resources alone, because oppression also operates structurally, through exploitation, marginalization, and cultural domination that redistribution can't fix on its own. Read together, Rawls and Young frame the tension I sit with constantly — between equity as fairness and equity as structural transformation. bell hooks'sTeaching to Transgress, including her writing on theory as a liberatory practice, and Peter McLaren's overview of critical pedagogy, both working in the tradition Paulo Freire established, insist that education is never neutral; it either domesticates or liberates, and pretending otherwise is itself a political choice. Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalitiesgrounds all of this in unflinching, concrete documentation of what unequal school funding actually does to children — a reminder that theory without material consequence is incomplete. And Maurianne Adams, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin's Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice is the closest thing this field has to a working manual — dense with facilitation frameworks for actually putting all of the above into practice in a classroom or training room.

Decolonial Theory and the Limits of Reform

Start here: Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies; Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor"; Eve Ewing's Original Sins.

This cluster pushes past reform and asks a harder question: what if some of the structures we're trying to make more equitable were never neutral to begin with? Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies asks researchers to reckon with research itself as a historically extractive practice for Indigenous and colonized peoples, and offers a framework for research that returns power to the communities it studies. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's"Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor" is essential precisely because it's a corrective aimed at people doing equity work in good faith — it insists that decolonization is a specific, material project involving land and sovereignty, not a general metaphor for any effort to make institutions more inclusive, and that collapsing the two does real harm. Eve Ewing'sOriginal Sins traces how American schooling was built simultaneously on anti-Blackness and the displacement of Indigenous peoples — a reminder that these histories aren't parallel footnotes, but a shared foundation. Together, this cluster keeps me honest about the difference between reforming a system and questioning whether the system's original design was ever meant to include everyone.

Validating Student Knowledge and the Whole Person

Start here: Rendon on validation theory; Tinto's theory of student departure; Schlossberg's transition theory and the concept of mattering; Strayhorn on sense of belonging; Katharine Manning's The Empathetic Workplace.

The last foundational cluster is about method and posture — how we actually see, validate, and respond to the whole person in front of us, not just the student role they occupy.

Laura Rendon's validation theory argues that many students, particularly first-generation and working-class students, need active, intentional validation from faculty and staff before they can see themselves as capable learners — that belonging often has to be offered, not just made available. It's worth reading Rendón alongside Vincent Tinto's theory of student departure, because Rendón built her framework partly as a corrective to it: Tinto's model asks students to integrate into the institution's existing culture, while Rendón flips the responsibility back onto the institution to validate the student as they already are. Nancy Schlossberg's transition theory adds the piece I come back to constantly: every major transition, like starting college, is easier to move through when a person feels they matter to someone — that their presence or absence would actually be noticed. Without that sense of mattering, students don't just struggle; they quietly fall through the cracks between advising, financial aid, a hard class, and home, because no single relationship was ever holding them in place. It's the theoretical backbone behind why I believe relationships have to come before learning, not after it. Terrell Strayhorn's work on sense of belonging extends this same thread and is probably the most-cited belonging scholarship in higher education after Schlossberg herself — his research makes the case that belonging isn't a soft add-on to learning but a basic human need that has to be met before students can take the academic risks that real learning requires. Katharine Manning's The Empathetic Workplace extends this posture beyond the classroom into how we respond when students or colleagues disclose trauma or hardship — offering a concrete, practical framework for listening and responding well in the moment, rather than freezing up or making things worse with good intentions alone. Together, this cluster shifts the practitioner's job from "fixing" students to building the conditions where students' existing knowledge, capability, and humanity can be recognized and acted on.

---

Part Two: For STEM Practitioners

If Part One gives you the conceptual foundation, this is the research I turn to for the specific, applied work of STEM teaching, advising, and program-building. This is where theory meets the syllabus, the lab bench, and the advising appointment.

Belonging and Identity in STEM

Start here: Steele and Aronson on stereotype threat; Dweck on growth mindset; Seymour and Hewitt, Talking About Leaving; Godwin and Kirn on identity-based motivation; Harackiewicz and colleagues on utility-value intervention; Hatfield, Brown, and Topaz on introductory courses and minoritized student attrition; Gasiewski and colleagues, "From Gatekeeping to Engagement"; my own first-author work (Hernandez and colleagues) on underrepresented student lab narratives.

STEM fields have a particular culture problem: they tend to treat struggle as evidence that someone doesn't belong, rather than as a normal feature of learning hard things. This research names that dynamic and offers levers to interrupt it. Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson's work on stereotype threat is probably the single most-cited psychological mechanism behind STEM performance gaps — the finding that simply being aware of a negative stereotype about your group can measurably depress performance, independent of actual ability, and that the right framing of a task can remove that pressure. Carol Dweck's growth mindset research is the other half of that coin: the belief that ability can be developed, rather than being fixed at birth, changes how students respond to difficulty in the first place. Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt's Talking About Leaving is the classic study behind almost everything else in this section — it's the original, large-scale qualitative account of why undergraduates actually leave STEM majors, and most of the newer research below is either extending it or responding to it directly. Allison Godwin and Adam Kirn's work on identity-based motivation shows how students' emerging engineering identities shape their sense of future possibility — belonging isn't just a feeling, it's a predictor of persistence. Judith Harackiewicz and colleagues' utility-value intervention research demonstrates that something as simple as helping students connect coursework to their own values can meaningfully close achievement gaps tied to race and social class — a genuinely hopeful finding about how small, well-designed interventions can matter. Work by Neil Hatfield, Nathanial Brown, and Chad Topaz and Josephine Gasiewski and colleagues on introductory STEM courses is essential reading precisely because it locates the "leak" in the STEM pipeline where it actually occurs — often in the first year, in the courses designed as filters rather than doors. And my own first-author work with colleagues, centering underrepresented students' own narratives about laboratory instruction, grew directly out of watching students describe a curriculum and a classroom relationship that, done well, let them start to see themselves as a "mini scientist" — someone already doing the work of science, not just preparing for it someday. That shift, from studying science to being a scientist in miniature, is exactly the kind of identity work that keeps students in the field long after the syllabus ends.

Naming Racialized Barriers in STEM — Without Blaming Students

Start here: McGee's Black, Brown, Bruised; Whitcomb and colleagues, "Not All Disadvantages Are Equal"; Adiredja and Louie on deficit discourses in math education.

This is the STEM-specific extension of the CRT tradition from Part One, and it's some of the most important reading for anyone who wants to avoid, even unintentionally, blaming students for structural problems. Ebony McGee's work on the racialized experience of STEM education is unflinching about the psychological and physical cost that students of color pay to persist in environments built without them in mind. Kyle Whitcomb and colleagues show that racial and ethnic disparities in GPA are largest specifically in STEM, not because of differences in student capability, but because of differences in what STEM environments demand and permit. And A. P. Adiredja and N. Louie's work untangling deficit discourses in mathematics education specifically offers practical language for identifying — and refusing — deficit framing in your own department's conversations about "struggling students."

Programs and Support Structures: The Evidence Base Behind MESA, TRIO, and EOPS

Start here: Treisman's Emerging Scholars Program research; Ro and colleagues on STEM education and servingness at HSIs; Garcia and colleagues' multidimensional framework for servingness; Garcia's "Beyond Graduation Rates"; Garcia and Cuellar on TRIO and self-determination; Beals and colleagues on peer mentoring and social capital; Graves and colleagues, "Knowledge Is Em(power)ing."

This is the research I use most directly in my own program work, because it's the evidence base behind the very support structures — MESA, TRIO, EOPS — that I write about constantly. Uri Treisman's research on the Emerging Scholars Program, built around a calculus workshop model for minoritized students at Berkeley, is one of the historical precedents these programs draw on: rather than remediating students seen as underprepared, Treisman built an honors-level peer study community and found that the students who'd been written off as at-risk consistently outperformed their peers once they had that structure around them. Hyun Kyoung Ro and colleagues' systematic review of STEM education at Hispanic-Serving Institutions, alongside the broader "servingness" framework developed by scholars including Gina Ann Garcia, moves the field beyond simply asking whether an institution enrolls Latino/a/x students toward asking whether it actually serves them — a distinction that should reshape how every HSI evaluates its own programs. Gina Ann Garcia's related work reframing student success beyond graduation rates, toward genuinely liberatory educational outcomes, is some of the most important writing I know for pushing practitioners past compliance metrics. N. Garcia and S. Cuellar's self-determination theory analysis of first-generation students in TRIO programs, Rebecca Beals and colleagues' research on peer and socio-emotional mentoring as a form of social capital, and K. N. Graves and colleagues' work showing that simply exposing underrepresented students to information about advanced degrees measurably shifts their sense of what's possible — all of this is direct, practical evidence for why mentoring and cohort-based support programs work, and how to make them work better.

Representation and Counter-Narrative: Seeing Yourself in the Story

Start here: Rossiter on the Matthew Matilda effect; the Hidden Figures-adjacent biographical scholarship on Johnson, Vaughan, Wu, and Franklin; institutional histories of WISE and MESA.

Sometimes the most powerful intervention is simply proof that people who look like your students have always been doing this work. The stories of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Rosalind Franklin are more than inspiring biography — they're a documented counter-narrative to the myth that science has ever been a solely white, male enterprise. Margaret Rossiter's work on the "Matthew Matilda effect" gives that counter-narrative its theoretical teeth, showing systematically how credit for scientific discovery has been disproportionately withheld from women throughout history — which reframes the underrepresentation students see today not as a natural state of affairs, but as an ongoing pattern with a documented history. Institutional histories, like the University of Michigan's History of WISE and the history of MESA itself, do similar work at the program level, showing students that the support structures around them were built deliberately, by people who came before.

Institutional and Policy Context

Start here: Eagan and colleagues, "What Matters in STEM"; Allen-Ramdial and Campbell, "Reimagining the Pipeline"; the National Academies report on advancing antiracism, DEI in STEMM organizations.

Finally, this cluster is for zooming out from the classroom to the institution and the field. Sylvia Hurtado and M. Kevin Eagan's research (with colleagues) on institutional contexts and STEM bachelor's degree completion, S.-A. Allen-Ramdial and A. G. Campbell's work reimagining the STEM pipeline, and reports from the National Academies of Sciences on advancing antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEMM organizations all push practitioners to see that individual teaching practice, however good, operates inside institutional structures that also need to change. This is essential reading for anyone in an administrative or program-leadership role, where your job is as much about shaping systems as it is about shaping any single course.

---

Why This List, Why Now

I share this not because I think everyone needs to read all of it before they're allowed to do the work — plenty of excellent practitioners build strong instincts without ever opening a journal article. But if you're the kind of person who wants the theory underneath your practice, who wants to know why the things that feel right actually work, this is where I'd point you.

And if you're further along in this work than I am: I'd genuinely love to know what's on your shelf. What's the piece of scholarship that changed how you saw your students, your classroom, or your own story? Drop it in the comments — I'm always adding to this list.

---

Full Reading List

A note on how this list is put together: some of these entries point to one specific paper or report, and for those I've given the full title. Others are ideas that individual scholars built and refined across a whole body of work, sometimes over decades and multiple books, rather than a single article. For those, I've named the concept and the scholar rather than pointing to one paper, because no single citation would really capture it.

Part One: Foundations

Critical Race Theory in Education

• Crenshaw, K. — "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics"

• DeCuir, J. & Dixson, A. — "'So When It Comes Out, They Aren't That Surprised That It Is There': Using Critical Race Theory as a Tool of Analysis of Race and Racism in Education"

• Delgado, R. & Stefancic, J. — Critical Race Theory: An Introduction

• Delgado Bernal, D. and colleagues — "An Introduction: Chicana/Latina Feminista Pláticas in Educational Research"

• Dixson, A. (Ed.) — Critical Race Theory in Education

• Ladson-Billings, G. & Tate, W. — "Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education"

• Solórzano, D. & Yosso, T. — "Critical Race and LatCrit Theory and Method: Counter-Storytelling"

• Yosso, T. — "Whose Culture Has Capital? A Critical Race Theory Discussion of Community Cultural Wealth," and her broader body of work developing the concept of student capital

Justice, Liberation, and What Education Is For

• Adams, M., Bell, L. A., & Griffin, P. (Eds.) — Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice

• Freire, P. — Pedagogy of the Oppressed

• hooks, b. — Teaching to Transgress

• Kozol, J. — Savage Inequalities

• McLaren, P. — "Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts"

• Rawls, J. — A Theory of Justice

• Young, I. M. — Justice and the Politics of Difference

Decolonial Theory and the Limits of Reform

• Ewing, E. — Original Sins

• Smith, L. T. — Decolonizing Methodologies

• Tuck, E. & Yang, K. W. — "Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor"

Validating Student Knowledge and the Whole Person

• Manning, K. — The Empathetic Workplace

• Rendon, L. — "Validating Culturally Diverse Students: Toward a New Model of Learning and Student Development," and her broader body of work developing validation theory

• Schlossberg, N. — her body of work developing transition theory and the concept of mattering

• Strayhorn, T. — his body of work on sense of belonging in higher education

• Tinto, V. — his body of work developing the theory of student departure

Part Two: For STEM Practitioners

Belonging and Identity in STEM

• Dweck, C. — her body of work developing growth mindset research

• Gasiewski, J. and colleagues — "From Gatekeeping to Engagement: A Multicontextual, Mixed Method Study of Student Academic Engagement in Introductory STEM Courses"

• Godwin, A. & Kirn, A. — "Identity-Based Motivation: Connections Between First-Year Students' Engineering Role Identities and Future-Time Perspectives"

• Harackiewicz, J. and colleagues — "Closing Achievement Gaps with a Utility-Value Intervention: Disentangling Race and Social Class"

• Hatfield, N., Brown, N., & Topaz, C. — "Do Introductory Courses Disproportionately Drive Minoritized Students Out of STEM Pathways?"

• Hernandez, T. and colleagues — "'At Least We Could Give Our Input': Underrepresented Student Narratives on Conventional and Guided Inquiry-Based Laboratory Approaches" (my own first-author work)

• Seymour, E. & Hewitt, N. — Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences

• Steele, C. & Aronson, J. — their body of work developing stereotype threat research

Naming Racialized Barriers in STEM

• Adiredja, A. P. & Louie, N. — "Untangling the Web of Deficit Discourses in Mathematics Education" (2020, For the Learning of Mathematics)

• McGee, E. — Black, Brown, Bruised

• Whitcomb, K. and colleagues — "Not All Disadvantages Are Equal: Racial/Ethnic Minority Students Have Largest Disadvantage Among Demographic Groups in Both STEM and Non-STEM GPA"

Programs and Support Structures

• Beals, R., Zimny, S., Lyons, F., & Bobbitt, O. — "Activating Social Capital: How Peer and Socio-Emotional Mentoring Facilitate Resilience and Success for Community College Students"

• Garcia, G. A. — "Beyond Graduation Rates: Conceptualizing Liberatory Educational Outcomes for Colleges and Universities"

• Garcia, G. A. and colleagues — "Toward a Multidimensional Conceptual Framework for Understanding 'Servingness' in Hispanic-Serving Institutions: A Synthesis of the Research"

• Garcia, N. & Cuellar, S. — "First-Generation College Students' Motivations to Succeed: An Analysis of Experiences with TRIO Programs Through a Self-Determination Theory Perspective" (2023, Journal of First-Generation Student Success)

• Graves, K. N., Rubien-Thomas, E., Streete, D. A., & Chang, S. W. C. — "Knowledge Is Em(power)ing: Historically Underrepresented Groups Benefit From Exposure to Information About Advanced Degrees in Psychology" (2021)

• Ro, H. K., Aguilar-Smith, S., Anderson, S. Y., Rodriguez, T., Ramon, E. J., & Javier, D. — "Attending to STEM Education in Servingness at Hispanic-Serving Institutions: A Systematic Review of More Than a Decade of Scholarship"

• Treisman, U. — his body of work on the Emerging Scholars Program

Representation and Counter-Narrative

• Institutional histories of WISE (University of Michigan) and MESA

• Rossiter, M. — "The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science"

• Biographical scholarship on Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Chien-Shiung Wu, and Rosalind Franklin

Institutional and Policy Context

• Allen-Ramdial, S.-A. A. & Campbell, A. G. — "Reimagining the Pipeline: Advancing STEM Diversity, Persistence, and Success" (2014, BioScience)

• Eagan, M. and colleagues — "What Matters in STEM: Institutional Contexts That Influence STEM Bachelor's Degree Completion Rates"

• National Academies of Sciences — Advancing Antiracism, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in STEMM Organizations: Beyond Broadening Participation