Increasing College Readiness for Disadvantaged Students Through an Online Growth Mindset Summer Bridge Program

Legitimizing home as a locus of learning has never been more critical to student success than now, during the world’s pandemic. Post-COVID 19, public education as an institutional “home†must be supported in a way that addresses the following question: how best can leaders manifest a paradigm of equitable college access through home learning for all in the face of a rising counter-paradigm of xenophobic nationalism, populism, and debunking of ethnic inclusiveness? Coloniality’s control of knowledge (Ayala and Ramirez 2019) has led to an information gap, which construes an unfair opportunity gap experienced by non-White groups in the U.S. public education system. This study will explore bridging that gap in an online blended learning method designed to champion all students regardless of race/ethnicity or socioeconomic status through targeted trainings with their school counselors. What is needed will be a disruption of epistemologies, knowledge systems and traditions of those who have been systematically marginalized via racialization. By shifting norms through access to previously privatized ways of knowing, the institutional punishment of students lacking financial resources can be flipped into a new narrative of increased equity and shared privilege.