Author ORCID Identifier

0009-0002-2344-1960

Date of Award

8-31-2026

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Education/Leadership in Urban Schools

First Advisor

Patricia Krueger-Henney

Second Advisor

Bodunrin O. Banwo

Third Advisor

Liya Escalera

Abstract

Although Black and Brown students are diversifying college campuses and opening doors for their families as new cohorts of first-generation collegians, they often find themselves silently dealing with the aftermath of academic neglect from U.S. secondary education. This phenomenon can be understood from extant literature as absence of reliable guidance, mentorship, resources, and support that help students persist and succeed in their academic goals. Existing explanations of grit and resilience (Duckworth et al., 2007) not only erase the existence and impact of academic neglect, but also mask the creative solutions and compensatory strategies that Black and Brown first-generation college students employ to persist in exclusionary educational settings. A theoretical framework of DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013) unearths the harmful role of a disabling education system that forces Black and Brown students to navigate education as afterthoughts fighting from the periphery of perceived educability to become the first in their families to find a way forward through higher education. The primary goal of this qualitative participatory phenomenological study is to understand what the experience of academic neglect from U.S. high school means to Black and Brown first-generation students navigating higher education effectively. Their experiences of high school academic neglect will be understood retrospectively in this study in order to explore how they made it through neglect to a common benchmark of undergraduate academic progress: the role of a peer mentor (either informally or formally in context of a first-year seminar’s academic support program), where they provide other students with the neglect-opposing support that they themselves did not have. Nine Black and Brown first-generation college students in peer mentoring roles participated in this study. From their experiences, a new structural description of academic neglect was constructed to grapple with what it meant to be unheard in one’s own education, as well as addressing the contradiction of cultures and values that happens in schools where Black and Brown first-generation students are not trusted to know what is best for them. The findings of this study also highlighted ways by which students responded to academic neglect and created new pathways with agency, advocacy, trust, and voice.

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