2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

The computing workforce struggles with hiring a diverse body of people and continues to perpetuate a culture that is saturated in white male toxicity. Increasingly, industry looks to higher education institutions as key access points for recruiting minoritized students (e.g., women, racial/ethnic, low-income). In particular, Hispanic-serving Community Colleges (HSCCs) are key points of entry to higher education for Latinx and other minoritized students and represent an ideal place from which industry might find a diverse pool of computing graduates. HSCCs often seek to provide culturally relevant experiences, both inside and outside of the classroom as well as may invoke “servingness” in their mission and student structures (Garcia et al., 2019). However, servingness may not flow from the larger HSCC administration institutional computing learning contexts.

Introductory HSCC computing classes represent a crucial point in which minoritized students come to see themselves in computing roles and may, ultimately, decide to remain or leave computing. To fully serve minoritized students in HSCC introductory computing courses, practitioners and scholars must understand more about how students experience servingness. Thus, we ask the research question: How do minoritized students in introductory computing classes at an HSCC experience elements of servingness?
Part of a larger NSF-funded project, our qualitative, phenomenological study (n=19) utilized the Multidimensional Conceptual Framework of Servingness (Garcia et. al, 2019), to explore the presence of servingness within student experiences. The framework has 7 components to explore including (1) External Influences on Serving (2) Structures for Serving (3) White supremacy (4) Validating Experiences Within the Structures (5) Racialized Experiences (6) Academic Outcomes and (7) Nonacademic Outcomes. Students participated in a 60-minute semi-structured interview that was then recorded, transcribed, coded, and analyzed through a phenomenological method. We went through examining our positionalities and engaging with Moustakas’ (1994) four-step phenomenological process to establish rigor and trustworthiness.
Preliminary findings indicate that students in introductory computing courses experienced some structures for serving, including the presence of programs and services for minoritized students and validating experiences within the structures, including positive interactions with faculty members. However, there were difficulties in finding specific cultural and group- oriented elements within the HSCC. While students acknowledged the presence of a diverse student body, and at times referred to some elements of racial identity, their introductory computing course experiences were largely identity-neutral, lacking any culturally responsive pedagogy, cultural validation, or interactions with same-race/ethnicity peers. Despite the fact that the larger project was funded by the HSI program, servingness structures were not immediately salient to the introductory computing student experiences.

This study demonstrates the nuance and complexity of serving within introductory courses at an HSCC. Although the larger NSF-funded project fell under the HSI program, it was unclear how elements of servingness were present in that funded work. Exploring servingness ensures that NSF-HSI Program funding is used to implement servingness in ways that elevate the computing experiences of minoritized students and prepare them for the computing workforce.