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Abstract
Black women are underrepresented in secondary math education, but their presence is critical for young black girls who dream of STEM careers. Some researchers believe that the number of Black women pursuing secondary math licensure can be increased through improved recruitment strategies, while others focus on causes of leakage in the education pipeline. This study focuses on what can be learned from the Black women who persisted so that this can inform strategies to support retention. To that end, this study sought to discover types of capital that Black women, who are preservice Mathematics teachers (PSMTs), relied on to persist towards the completion of their teacher preparation programs. Framed using Critical Race Feminism and Black Feminism, this study employed Counternarrative Inquiry to discover the capital that the five PSMTs credited for their ability to stay the course. The PSMTs attended universities that were either public or private, Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) or Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Through thematic inductive analysis of narrative interviews, six capitals were revealed to have been instrumental in the PSMTs’ persistence: expectation capital, mathematical capital, fortifying capital, actuation capital, equanimity capital, and confounding capital. The findings indicate that, while PSMTs might use the same capital, they use it in a variety of ways and for different purposes. A key implication of the findings from this study is that, if undergraduate math educators can mitigate or eliminate the conditions within the math classroom that triggers the use of many of the capitals in this study, Black women who are PSMTs may be able to divert their energies to developing robust mathematical identities. A second implication was that if the faculty and staff of teacher preparation programs demonstrate the qualities of caring and commitment to their success, Black women who are PSMTs might look to them as a source of fortification for their persistence. The community of mathematics educators can act now to support the retention of the Black female PSMTs who are currently in teacher preparation programs. The impact of the actions they take is amplified when there is intentionality, vigilance, and a genuine desire for the successful program completion of Black female PSMTs.