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This chapter will highlight the process of engaging Black college men in leadership learning by centering their intersecting identities. We employed liberatory pedagogy through an anti-deficit achievement framework for course design and delivery. The chapter addresses the importance and implications of understanding how engaging with same-race and same-gendered peers in formal leadership curricula can support Black men in continuing to develop their leadership identity, capacity, and efficacy. This chapter will end with key course outcomes, pedagogical methods to center identity and build leadership capacity, and key takeaways for leadership educators developing courses that engage Black college men. This chapter concludes with recommendations for research, policy, and practice and offers reflection questions for educators, advisors, and mentors to consider when designing curricula that center on Black men and their leadership learning.

Research studies indicate African American males face multiple and reinforcing obstacles by choosing to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) related majors and professions. Though participation in STEM fields has increased, African American males remain underrepresented in STEM academic programs and occupations as a whole, and in the computing sciences specifically. In the STEM field of computing sciences, isolation, inadequate advisement, among other complex factors, perpetuate the underrepresentation and low persistence of African American males in academic programs. Utilizing viable social identity and communities of practice as theoretical underpinnings, this qualitative study into the lives of aspiring and current African American male computer scientists produced findings that illuminate the significance of what I call STEMfluences, or social interactions that promote socialization, STEM identity, confidence, and success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics related disciplines like the computing sciences, and promote persistence through degree attainment in homogeneous, unwelcoming STEM academic environments. These STEMfluences are social constructs that include positive peer interactions and modeling, parental and familial nurturing, and multifaceted mentorship.

In the 1980s, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) passed several eligibility rules to address concerns about the academic and personal development of its participants (Gaston-Gayles, 2009). Despite garnering publicity, fostering school pride, providing entertainment, and generating billions of dollars in revenue for the Division I-affiliated institutions they attend (Sylwester, M., & Witosky, T. (2004). Athletic spending grows as academic funds dry up. USAToday.com , February 18. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2004-02-18-athletic-spending- cover_x.htm), student-athletes are prevented from receiving compensation beyond athletic scholarships by the NCAA’s amateurism principle. Consequently, the ethical question at the center of college sports is: how do participants benefit from the college experience relative to their non-sport peers? While the NCAA typically reports benefits, research that disaggregates the data by sport, division, race, and sex reveals long-standing and pervasive inequities (Harper, Williams, & Blackman, 2013). Accordingly, this chapter juxtaposes NCAA’s rhetoric, principles, and espoused goals with the lived realities of the most populous demographic group within high revenue-generating collegiate sports, Black male student-athletes.

This chapter explores how the intersections of race, gender, and class combine to affect Black undergraduate women and their engagement with high impact practices (HIPs). Specifically, this chapter describes the extent to which Black undergraduate women engaged in HIPs of service-learning, research with faculty, and internships; describes factors that contributed to their engagement (or non-engagement) in the HIPs, while attending a PWI; and explores the role race, gender, and class had on engagement (or non-engagement) with these HIPs. This study used a two-phase sequential explanatory mixed methods approach, which consisted of an electronic survey (n = 190) and semi-structured interviews (n = 10). Survey items were taken from the National Survey of Student Engagement, The College Student Report. The study was conceptually grounded by intersectionality, which allowed an exploration of how social inequalities and power relations intersect to potentially influence the college experience of Black women. Findings indicate that Black women are engaging with HIPs. Factors contributing to engagement included positive faculty interactions, desire to make connections on campus and the need to acquire real world work experience. Factors contributing to non-engagement included lack of knowledge regarding HIPs and the impact of the campus climate on students' sense of belonging and occurrences of stereotype threat.

This chapter explores the complexity of issues surrounding Black males and athletics in higher education. Multiple studies over the past decade and a half have depicted an oppositional relationship between athletics and academic achievement. Research suggests that media imagery, stereotyping, and other non-academic influences on African American males who participate in intercollegiate athletics tend to result in an over-identification with professional athletes, sports, and perceptions of great value associated with physical performance activities and a simultaneous under-identification with academic performance, scholarly identity, and student development. These pressures ultimately limit career options outside of athletics. In an effort to combat these issues, Beyond the Game™ (BTG) Program, a program described in this chapter that was developed in Wisconsin’s Equity and Inclusion Laboratory (Wei LAB) and implemented at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seeks to harness curricular, co-curricular, and on-the-field leadership training to strategically develop and support post-graduation options. This comprehensive, multi-faceted program directly confronts the challenges student-athletes face when they exhaust their eligibility status but have yet to identify viable career alternatives to professional sports. This chapter explores the main tenants of the program, established with a group of Division 1 NCAA-affiliated college athletes as participants.

The underrepresentation of men of color (MOC) in US higher education and the growing disparities in their educational attainment has prompted much concern among policy makers and educators. The objective of this chapter is to address the comparative perspectives on equity and inclusion aim of the book by exploring why MOC are less like to earn a degree. We begin with a review of the contemporary literature on MOC and their academic transition to college in the United States. Next, findings from a longitudinal study that explored the early transitional challenges experienced by this population are presented. Results show the stark differences between high school and college in terms of faculty expectations, autonomous responsibility for academic coursework, and academic demands permeated early academic experiences of a group of MOC. Implications for practitioners are discussed.

In this chapter, the authors offer a critical appraisal of predictions of a jobless future due do rapid technological change, as well as provide evidence on whether the rate of occupational change has been increasing. The authors critique the “task replacement” methodology that underlies the most powerful and specific predictions about the impact of technology on employment in particular occupations. There are a number of reasons why assuming a correspondence between task replacement and employment declines is not warranted. The authors also raise questions about how rapidly the development, acceptance, and diffiusion of labor-displacing technologies is likely to occur. In the empirical portion of the chapter, the authors compare the current rate of employment disruption with those observed in earlier periods. This analysis is based on an analysis of occupation data in the US covering the period 1870–2015. Using an index of dissimilarity as the metric, the authors find that the rate of occupational change from 1870 to 2015 does not provide evidence of a sharp uptick in the rate of occupational shifts in the information age. Instead, the rate of occupation shifts has been declining slowly throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, the issues and results discussed here suggest that imminent massive employment displacement is not a foregone conclusion.

The growing body of research on student engagement in online writing courses suggests that learning management system (LMS) technology does not by itself create an interactive learning situation nor does it automatically engage students in meaningful interactions with their peers and the instructor. Traditional top-down engagement strategies such as a discussion forum, we argue, have not worked to increase student-to-student engagement in the online environment, confirming our contention that students’ notions of engagement and quality are different from instructors’. Engagement should be re-envisioned as a student-centered effort, wherein educators take on the responsibility of implementing strategies that promote student-to-student engagement. This chapter, then, reconceptualizes approaches to student engagement in online writing-intensive classes. It examines how virtual learning environments challenge traditional notions of student engagement, offers some innovative learner–instructor engagement strategies that can be marshaled to improve student learning, and addresses the challenges and successes of this undertaking, in an effort to establish a meaningful and sustainable student-centered online writing classroom.

With heightened national attention placed on race and gender identity, the ability and preparedness of students to engage in critical conversations on such topics and with diverse groups is of much concern to educators. High school student-athletes are frequently thrust into the spotlight on topics related to race and racial identity, due to their hypervisibility and role as representatives of their schools. This chapter uses current events involving Black girl, high school, student-athletes to demonstrate how racialized and gendered experiences may shape how they understand themselves as well as their school and non-school environments. Further, this chapter includes a study that highlights the narratives of two Black female college athletes who, when prompted to discuss racialized and gendered experiences, shared stories that highlighted their primary and secondary educational experiences. These narratives identify school diversity and fitting in, and the coach as influencer as salient themes from the study. This illuminates the influence of early racialized encounters and the salience of those occurrences in shaping the way Black girls think about their own racial and gender identity development. In closing, this chapter calls on educators to prepare themselves to facilitate conversations about race through the use of equity audits, effective programming for Black girls, and a call for education advocates for Black girls in preK-12 environments.