A Journey to Become Aware of How Our Transfer Students of Color Experience Systemic Discrimination

Advocates are people who support transfer students of color to obtain a bachelors in STEM while being aware of the students' needs and the demands of the institutions. These two could be at odds for TSOC-STEM but advocates do and learn about how to resist the dominant perception of scientists. We start by extending the work of Acevedo (2020). Her work was focused on high school teachers who are Nepantleras in supporting students to continue their education past high school, while my work is extending her codes towards a different space, the bachelor degree-granting institution (BDGI). Within the space the Nepantlera/o/x are faculty and staff who are supporting transfer students from an associate degree-granting institution to successfully confer their STEM degree. Similarly to extending Acevedo's work, I extend the Aguilar-Valdez and colleagues (2013) work on the stages of the path of conocimiento of a K-12 STEM teacher towards the BDGI space. In this work two new codes emerged and are named Mestiza/o/x consciousness and thoughtful language. These two codes have given me the opportunity to discuss the Nepantlera/o/x navigation of the path of conocimiento which has seven stages that are fluid and flexible to be at different stages at the same time.