Communities of Exclusion: Women StudentExperiences in Information Technology Classrooms
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Julia Colyar
Despite important enrollment gains in science and engineering majors, women students are still conspicuously underrepresented in information technology (IT) programs. Previous research has reported that women students are isolated and less confident in their IT courses and, ultimately, become discouraged by competitive classroom environments. In this article, I extend previous research on the classroom experiences of women IT students through a series of ethnographic observations aimed at understanding classroom discourses. Rather than focusing on women students' challenges, I focus on classroom spaces, interactions, and community characteristics. I argue that the four classroom contexts included in this study can be described in terms of two discourses: discourses of power and discourses of disengagement-discourse patterns the women students in this study have limited access to and utility with. These understandings can be beneficial to faculty and student affairs professionals as they seek to improve classroom communities for all students.
©2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Editor's Note
- Editors' Note
- Article
- The National Association for Women in Education: An Enduring Legacy
- Gender Differences Over the Span of College: Challenges to Achieving Equity
- Leadership in a World of Divided Feminism
- A Window Into the Culture of Leadership Within Higher Education Through the Leadership Definitions of Women Faculty: A Case Study of ELAM Women Faculty Alumnae
- Welfare Women Go Elite: The Ada Comstock Scholars Program
- Communities of Exclusion: Women StudentExperiences in Information Technology Classrooms
- The Impact of Childhood Abuse on University Women's Career Choice
- She Fears You: Teaching College Men to End Rape
- A Man's Academy? The Dissertation Process as Feminist Resistance
- American Indian Women in Academia: The Joys and Challenges
- Program Description
- Virtual Women's Center
- Pilot Women's Empowerment Program
- Professional Peer Clinical Supervision: A Model for theProfessional Development of Counselor Educators
- Benefiting Female Students in Science, Math, andEngineering: Establishing a WISE Learning Community
- Mentoring-for-Leadership Lunch Series for Women SEMFaculty
- Book Review
- The Balancing Act: Gender Perspectives in Faculty Roles andWork Lives
- The Doctor's Complete College Girls' Health Guide: From Sexto Drugs to the Freshmen Fifteen
- "Strangers" of the Academy: Asian Women Scholars in Higher Education
- Removing Barriers: Women in Academic Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
- College Girls: Bluestockings, Sex Kittens, and Coeds, Thenand Now
