Date of Award

8-2026

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Educational Leadership, Research and Technology

First Advisor

Regina L. Garza Mitchell, Ed.D.

Second Advisor

LaSonja Roberts, Ed. D.

Third Advisor

Keenan King, Ph. D.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine, understand, and creatively represent the stories of African American male college students from low-income backgrounds who were raised by single parents and were academically successful. Guided by the overarching research question — What are the stories of academically successful African American male college students from lowincome homes who single parents raised? — The study sought to understand how participants navigated institutional racism and systemic barriers while achieving academic success, and how they resisted deficit-based stereotypes and expectations in higher education.

This study employed a critical, arts-based, qualitative narrative inquiry approach grounded in critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano, 1997, 1998) as its theoretical framework. Eight African American men affiliated with Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc., from chapters within the Northern Province were recruited using purposive and snowball sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured narrative interviews of 60 to 90 minutes, conducted via Microsoft Teams, and analyzed using Saldaña's (2016) dramaturgical coding framework alongside CRT-oriented codes developed from Delgado and Stefancic (2021). Thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was then applied to identify patterns across participants' narratives. As a methodological innovation within the arts-based research tradition, the findings were presented as a full-length feature screenplay titled The Weight We Carry — to the researcher's knowledge, the first instance of this format serving as the primary findings chapter of a doctoral dissertation.

The findings revealed that participants' academic success was sustained not by institutional support but by a relational ecology comprised of three interdependent layers: the foundational influence of single mothers who transmitted college-going expectations despite significant structural obstacles; the institutional bridge provided by Black Greek Letter fraternal membership, which supplied navigational capital and institutional literacy that participants' family backgrounds had not transmitted; and the critical interventions of older African American male mentors who appeared at pivotal moments to redirect trajectories that institutional systems had failed to support. Across all eight participants, success was understood as a collective obligation — one that carried a responsibility to reach back and make the path navigable for those who came behind them. These findings confirm and extend existing scholarship on African American male college achievement while demonstrating that the feature screenplay, as a research representational form, can depict dimensions of human experience that conventional qualitative methods alone cannot fully capture.

Access Setting

Dissertation-Open Access

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