This qualitative longitudinal study explored the experiences of Black males attending a public, two-year, community college Hispanic-serving community college (HSCC) in Southern California. Drawing on the perspective of HSCCs as reflecting a colonial relationship between whites and Students of Color, we outline specific forms of anti-Black racism that include the rejection of Black intellectualism, presumed ownership of Blacks’ intellectual and material property, and psychological violence and rejection of Black suffering. We articulate a need for researchers to attend to institutionalized forms of anti-Blackness across structurally diverse institutional contexts – as well as predominantly white ones – and a need to articulate realities that exist outside the ‘settler colonial logics’ that permeate higher education.

Relying on semi-structured, qualitative interviews with 13 Latino male undergraduates in engineering, this study explored students experiences and sense of belonging within a Minority Retention Program at a 4-year public university in California. Findings support extent research on the importance of structural interventions in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) while highlighting nuance in experiences of Latino males, including perceptions of stigma associated with participation. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Bourdieu’s critical analysis of capital (BCAC) is a useful tool for unmasking how schools legitimate class structure and identifying the institutional, societal, and cultural forces that structure class reproduction and oppression. In this paper, we examine the ways educational researchers have constrained the critical application of Bourdieu’s concepts. We highlight the utility of BCAC for exposing the symbolic violence that educational systems enact upon students and families who are unfamiliar with the “culture of power.” Our purpose is to engage in a revitalized critique against the reproduction of educational inequalities and explicate how BCAC is useful toward these ends.

Despite decades of research indicating classrooms shape student engagement, learning, and development, there is a dearth of empirically grounded research focusing specifically on observed classroom engagement as a predictor of student outcomes in community colleges. This article describes the development of a qualitatively grounded, quantitative classroom-level engagement measurement protocol designed for this purpose. We provide evidence for the measure’s validity and reliability via confirmatory factor analyses and descriptive analyses that offer a snapshot of the information this measure can generate. Furthermore, we examine a two-level structural equation regression model that uses student survey data from students nested in observed classrooms. We then review our results in light of the relevance this measure has for researchers and educators in community colleges.