“Girls Hold All the Power in the World”: Cultivating Sisterhood and a Counterspace to Support STEM Learning with Black Girls

For far too long, schools have been violent places where Black girls are often adultified, overdisciplined, and overlooked. In school science mathematics specifically, isolated, tokenized, made to feel invisible. This qualitative study leveraged the Multidimensionality of Girls’ STEM Learning conceptual framework explore roles two women middle teachers on learning experiences 12 who live in U.S. Midwest how engage with culturally relevant lessons an afterschool program—SISTERHOOD I AM STEM. Data sources included a demographic questionnaire, program artifacts, semi-structured transformative dialogic interviews student teacher participants. Findings revealed significance benefits single-gender environments for struggle connect role creating safe spaces engagement. addition, served as mechanism promote self-visualization confidence HyFlex model fostering communal experience their families. space organized facilitated by educators resisted girls’ pathologization cultivated sense belonging. It holds promise developing social bonds that critically important persistence field new narrative “Girls hold all power world”.