Date of Award
2026-05-22
Degree Name
PhD Education for Social Justice
Dissertation Committee
Sarina C. Molina, EdD, Chair; Zulema Reynoso, PhD, Member
Keywords
Higher Education, Critical Resilience, Student Belonging
Abstract
Campus cultural centers frequently treat student resilience as an individual struggle rather than a collective responsibility, obscuring systemic failures. At a predominantly white institution (PWI), historically resilient students, those from diverse backgrounds who have historically endured the structural load of institutional exclusion, carry the compounded weight of navigating systemic barriers while driving institutional change. This qualitative study disrupts traditional narratives of surviving and thriving to examine how undergraduate students constituting a student advisory committee (SAC) coconstructed critical resilience rooted in transformative and collective care.
Using community-based participatory research (CBPR), this study positions students as coarchitects of their institutional experiences. Over seven sessions, the SAC codesigned a curriculum to build collective awareness, name systemic challenges, and generate student-driven recommendations informed by a survey and focus groups with 24 students.
Findings revealed that participants moved from individual survival toward collective agency when provided scaffolds of sufficiency, the interconnected supports, resources, and relationships that foster surviving and thriving, alongside asset-based mindsets and transformative actions across institutional levels. Participants identified three intersecting gaps: lack of resource visibility, financial resources, and communal space. Together, we designed departmental service change recommendations to move the institution from neutrality to proactive investment in student voice.
This living praxis affirms transformative care requires active pedagogical support and tangible resources that decenter power and scaffold student thriving. This dissertation contributes equitable models of administrator-student coinquiry that resist survivor bias, name institutional neutrality as a form of harm, and reimagine cultural centers as engines of proactive, student-driven institutional transformation.
Document Type
Dissertation: Open Access
Department
Leadership Studies
Digital USD Citation
Coleman, Tanaisha, "A Praxis of Transformative Care: Centering Historically Resilient Students at a PWI" (2026). Dissertations. 1096.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/dissertations/1096
Copyright
Copyright held by the author
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a CC BY License.
Included in
Educational Leadership Commons, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Commons, Secondary Education Commons
Comments
Please reach out to Tanaisha Coleman via email (tcc@tanaishacolemanconsulting.com) for research inquiries.