Supporting Minoritized Student Leaders

Creating meaningful, supportive, and inclusive climates and situations that recognize and honor minoritized students’ backgrounds and experiences while fostering a safe and welcoming learning environment and promoting minoritized student retention have become critical emphases of universities’ efforts. Notably, minoritized student leaders have served important roles in these efforts by universities as these individuals represented their peers from various student organizations to university staff members and administrators advocating on behalf of their peers to enhance minoritized students’ experiences at the university. Moreover, development and enhancement of important skills to facilitate these efforts was likely to aid them in being effective as they represented their peers. To support the development and enhancement of student leaders’ ability to effectively represent their organizations, I devised a brief innovation to build student leaders’ skills in four areas including (a) relationship building to foster peer students’ belonging, (b) advocacy and activism, (c) data gathering, and (d) presentation and effective communication skills. In the dissertation, I considered the experiences of minoritized student leaders. Quantitative, survey results showed student leaders increased their skills and attitudes toward serving in their roles. Qualitative findings demonstrated five themes emerged from the interview data about the experiences of minoritized student leaders. Those themes included personal reflection on their leadership efforts, creating space to build community, leveraging their voice, working together with staff members, and recognizing the influence of identity dynamics and the importance of inclusive environments. In the discussion, I described the complementarity of the quantitative and qualitative results, connected the findings to theoretical perspectives, offered limitations of the study, suggested implications for practice, and presented conclusions.