Teaching Equity through Assets-Based Journaling: Using Community Cultural Wealth to Guide Student Reflections

Abstract Students from historically excluded groups at primarily White institutions (PWIs) are too often made to feel that their experiences put them at a disadvantage compared to their peers from majority groups. While faculty and administrators can be well-intentioned, thinking they are identifying barriers that they can then solve, this deficit-based mindset can have harmful effects on the students they seek to serve. Increasingly, scholars have begun to call for assets-based approaches that highlight the forms of capital that these students have. Our research team developed a series of reflective prompts based on the Community Cultural Wealth (CCW) framework (i.e., aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistant capital). In this study, 80 students were asked to complete reflections based on these prompts at the beginning of, during, and end of a four-week engineering study abroad program co-taught by one of the authors. Additionally, at the end of the program prior to the final reflection due date, the author gave a lecture and led a discussion explaining community cultural wealth and how the reflections tied into it, inviting students to share their experiences and what they learned about themselves. Fifty-six students (70%) identified as people of color, 25 (31%) as women, and many as low-income and/or first-generation college students. This presentation will focus on our development of these CCW reflective prompts and present results from a thematic analysis of student responses to the questions "What did you learn from reflecting on these types of capital?", "How has journaling helped you realize what assets you already have?", and "How might you use these assets when you return home?" Preliminary analysis shows that by completing these reflections, students realized skills they didn't know they had, increased their confidence in navigating the world, and came to understand that their lived experiences are assets rather than deficits. This presentation will also discuss how instructors can adapt the CCW reflective prompts for their own students.