Abstract
This editorial and themed issue is a call to redirect our efforts from teaching Black women and girls how to navigate and persist in toxic STEM learning environments to a greater vision of being and becoming. As we consider what becoming means for Black girls who transition into Black women in STEM learning spaces and careers, there is often an untold story of struggle, resistance, and resilience. I present the experiences of three Black women physicists who in very recent years became the first, while contributors in this issue share cutting-edge scholarship on how Black girls engage in youth participatory action research, the role of race and gender discrimination on Black girls’ mathematical attitudes and beliefs, and how Black girls develop scientific literacies in elementary classrooms. Additional research explores how Black women experience imposter syndrome in their pursuit of terminal STEM degrees, while the final piece in this issue shares counternarratives of Black women engineering teachers by drawing attention to aspirational capital and communal support. We elevate the voices of Black women and girls to author their own stories as unsung heroes in this body of work and reposition them as experts of their experiences. This courageous and radical shift requires coconspirators and agitators to move the equity agenda forward so that Black girls and women are not burdened with the labor of undoing, disrupting, and dismantling systems of oppression that they did not create.
Authors retain copyright control of articles published in the journal. Reprints cannot be granted for articles in new issues. Except in these cases, those who wish to reprint articles, large excerpts, figures, graphs, tables, or images should contact authors directly. When referencing any published articles from this online journal, JAAWGE is to be credited as the publication outlet. We suggest including the URL link to JAAWGE. Permission to copy an article is provided to all subscribers, but cannot be sold, except by its author(s). Authors are free to disseminate and post their articles.