Studies carried out in numerous national contexts suggest that students from socio-economically impoverished backgrounds are associated with academic underachievement (Filmer & Pritchett, 1999). Some underprivileged students, however, manage to perform outstanding educational outcomes despite their adverse background. The dynamic process in which these students negotiate, adapt to, and cope with their circumstances is often referred to as ‘resilience’ (Howard et al., 1999).

During the 1990s, researchers started to explore resilience in the context of education, that is ‘academic resilience’. Accordingly, the notion of academic resilience is described as performing relatively well in school despite an adverse background (Alva, 1991; Wang et al., 1994). Several studies have found that academic resilience is associated with certain protective factors, both related to the individual and their environment (home, school, community), that modify or influence a person’s responses to adversities (Jowkar et al., 2014). Such factors are important to identify in order to understand how suitable support can be provided in order to create inclusive and equitable educational opportunities for all.

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education research has a long tradition of engaging with inequalities, often related to the performance and participation of students from different genders, ethnicities, and socio-economic backgrounds. A variety of conceptual tools have been applied to understand the uneven performance and participation in science, such as interest and taste (Anderhag et al., 2015), science capital (Archer et al., 2015) and science identity (Danielsson et al., 2023). There is also a rich literature that seeks to adapt science education in order to enhance the sense of belonging in the discipline for students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Barton & Tan, 2009). Such teaching interventions are often characterized by how they seek to bridge students’ life-worlds and science by, for example, eliciting and valuing students’ funds of knowledge. Other studies look at how minoritized students in STEM responded to challenges and develop their mathematical identities and pursue STEM career (Joseph et al., 2020). Consequently, STEM education research has been deeply invested in improving the teaching and learning for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Still, with a few notable exceptions (Ferguson & Martin‐Dunlo, 2021), this has not been conceptualized in terms of developing students’ academic resilience. We posit that an increased conversation between STEM education research seeking to improve the educational experience of disadvantaged students and research about academic resilience would be beneficial to both lines of research. Since the findings from the resilience research field are largely extracted from quantitative studies, the knowledge of how resilience is developed through the interplay between the individual and their environment is sparse.

The aim of this paper is to contribute a multifaceted exploration of an educational trajectory from childhood characterized by circumstances to doing a PhD in mathematics. The study is grounded in an interest of understanding how academic resilience be conceptualized in a way that allows for STEM-specific disciplinary aspects to be taken into account. More specifically, we ask:

- What resources (at individual/school/family/community level) were accessed by the student in order to allow for a successful educational trajectory in STEM?

We will present our preliminary results from a pilot case study of a scholar coming from Southeast Asia and now doing PhD in Mathematics at a Swedish university.

Our study employed the timeline interviewing method (Adriansen, 2012) that is utilized as a tool to visualize critical events of a personal life journey. Using this method, the interviewee was given agency to take ownership of the process and share analytical power in how their life story is told. Moreover, this method provides possibilities of seeing events and perceptions toward these events through the broader lens of reflection on life experiences. In particular, we were able to obtain a detailed and in-depth knowledge and understanding of students’ narrative of the resources they perceived they received and accessed to help them succeed in school. In our pilot study, the interviewee was invited to participate in a Zoom interview, using an online digital drawing tool to ensure the drawing was visibly shared for both the interviewee and interviewer. The interviewee is a Vietnamese man PhD student in Mathematics at a Swedish university. He was born and raised by his single mom in a southern rural area of Vietnam and had previous to enrolling in the current PhD programme studied abroad in different countries. The interview started by asking one question: ‘Tell me the journey of how did you end up becoming a PhD student in Mathematics?’. The interviewee was encouraged to freely choose the starting point to tell his story: he started when he was born, and emphasized the critical events and moments along his journey. The interviewer also helped him elaborate on some incidents that captured crucial stages of life or to better understand the role of some people or other resources alongside those critical events. The interview lasted 1 hour and 52 minutes and was recorded with the interviewee's consent.

In this pilot study, we identified four sets of resources: school, home, community, and individual resources, that the student had been able to access to develop his academic resilience. Firstly, school resources he highlights in his narrative were predominantly of a material kind and include the mathematics teacher’s support by providing a computer, money and books; the school granted him money to travel to be trained in advanced level in mathematics for a national competition; his teachers raised funds to grant him a monthly stipend. Secondly, home resources brought forward in the narrative were both immaterial, such as his mother’s belief in and valuing of education as a gateway from poverty, and material, in how relatives provided him with accommodation. Thirdly, material community resources of importance include a librarian and a bookshop owner befriended, who lent him books. The municipality offered him a long-term accommodation as a reward for his first prize in math and literature at provincial level. Fourthly, the interviewee identified himself as a strong, self-regulated, intelligent and hardworking individual, with a high level of self-efficacy. He had a clear vision for his dream career of becoming a mathematics teacher because he sees this profession as associated with pride and prestige and the discipline of mathematics as a transparent and non-arbitrary knowledge system (in contrast to economic, which was perceived as more arbitrary). The analysis contributes a multifaceted perspective on the complex set of material and immaterial resources associated with academic resilience. In particular, this study contributes by exemplifying how and in what ways specific resources may come into play when an individual successively is overcoming encountered adversities. More studies from other contexts are however needed and so providing the field with further insights on how material and immaterial resources may facilitate the process of becoming academically resilient.

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