Mt. San Jacinto College (MSJC) is a community college in Southern California with a Hispanic Serving Institute (HSI) title (obtained in 2001), serving 48% of college students who identify as Hispanic, many of whom are first-generation. MSJC staff, faculty, and administrators have developed informal and formal pathways to support and improve Latinx student transfer, retention, and success rates, through programs such as the Puente Project, the Learning Resource Center (LRC), Math Undergraduate Preparation (UP), Eagles Landing (Center for Student Essentials), and the Personalized Academic Learning Skills (PALS) program,. As an institution, MSJC offers programs like PALS, but it is the students and employees who create an academic counter-space for diverse Hispanic learners. An academic counter-space is defined by Solórzano and colleagues (2000) as “an educational space where deficit thinking about students of color is challenged and a positive racial campus climate exists” (as cited in Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 3). The PALS program promotes a culture of equity and inclusion to support all MSJC’s student populations, including students who identify as having specific learning disabilities under the California Community College Learning Disability and Eligibility and Services Model (LDESM) (PALS website). Staff and faculty leverage specialized instruction and services to support this student population, incorporating programs like Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which prioritizes learner agency, or “the capacity to actively participate in making choices in service of learning goals” (CAST, n.d.). PALS develops learner agency by prioritizing inclusivity, particularly for our Latinx scholars.
As a framework, UDL encourages faculty, staff, student workers, and students to disrupt “dominant academic norms, [and] challenge the racial and cultural mismatch that reproduces harm in educational settings” (Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 3). It comes as no surprise how difficult the educational system is to navigate, especially for non-traditional and first-generation college students. It is even more challenging for those who have an invisible disability. This is a problem faced by most community college students, as “non-traditional learners comprise approximately 73% of undergraduate enrollment, representing diverse populations including first-generation college students, adult learners, veterans, multilingual learners, and students with family responsibilities” (Chick et al., 2025, p. 1).
As a way to close the academic gaps between racially minoritized, non-traditional college students and traditional college students, scholars call for programs and curricula that decenter whiteness and challenge Eurocentric dominant narratives in educational spaces, encouraging Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) in undergraduate research (Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p.8). This approach encourages first-generation and racially minoritized students to conduct research that centers the lived experiences of racially minoritized students; it also actively resists race-neutral narratives, policies, and practices in education (Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 2). With culturally responsive selections of assigned readings, diverse guest speakers, culturally relevant research topics, and the cultivation of a supportive cohort environment, first-generation and racially minoritized community college students can participate in project-based learning to further their college and career readiness (Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 2).
Applying CRP to project-based learning and research aligns with UDL practices. However, Jacobson and Giblen (2023) criticize the racial and socio-economic limitations of UDL, arguing that embedded tutoring should be used as an “effective pedagogical method across multiple guidelines” (60). They claim UDL has the potential to be used “as an anti-racist tool” to enhance the academic experiences of first-generation and racially marginalized college students with learning differences (Jacobson & Giblen, 2023, p. 59). UDL is a universal framework that promotes inclusivity and encourages diverse learners to engage and participate with their competitive peers “by providing multiple means for representation, action and expression, and engagement [with the development of] metacognitive skills, such as self-regulation and monitoring, as well as self-directed learning skills” (Mulcahy & Wertz, 2020, p. 343). As a result, academic engagement increases when diverse learners are able to conduct research that aligns with their intersectional identities, allowing students “to feel more connected with the assigned readings and guest speakers, foster discussions that engage students in authentic expressions of their lived experiences, and nurture a counter-space with their peers that challenge stereotypes of what and who research was for” (Horg-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 3). By coupling UDL with CRP, first-generation and racially minoritized community college students are able to thrive in academic counter-spaces that are created with intention and care.
Academic Counter-spaces at PALS
Providing academic counter-spaces encourages students to conduct research that is relevant to their community’s lived experiences, and has an impact on undergraduate research overall. UDL guidelines encourage academic counter-spaces as students conduct research in non-traditional methods that makes it more accessible and equitable, especially to Hispanic diverse learners. The PALS program at MSJC serves as a bridge to connect the gap between accessibility and systemic barriers for diverse learners who are also racially marginalized. The PALS lab is located within the tutoring center (in the library); thus, it serves as a community-building area that provides a welcoming environment for diverse students to cultivate professional relationships with their peers, staff, and faculty. The PALS program is designed to provide multi-modal academic support that promotes accessibility and inclusivity for individualized instruction that is necessary for diverse needs, offering multiple means of representation, action and expression, and engagement (CAST, n.d.). Such multi-modal support includes online study skills workshop recordings, incorporation of assistive technologies, and one-on-one individualized assistance, which are used as tools for “multiple modes of communication, scaffolding goal setting and planning, and [providing] access to varieties of assistive tools and navigation” (Jacobson & Giblen, 2023, p. 57). To further promote an academic counter-space, PALS closely collaborates with the library, tutoring center, and the disability services department to bring academic support services to students with in-class workshops as well as class visits to the library and tutoring center for research support. These supports reduce the systemic barriers that racially marginalized students face to “demystify the research process” (Hong-Aaron et al., 2025, p. 3).
Through intentional creation—and funding—of academic counter-spaces for students, non-traditional scholars succeed academically. Moreover, they are also prepared to be critical thinkers, engaged in public service for their local communities. Ultimately, academic counter-spaces break systemic barriers.
References:
CAST. (2024). CAST Universal Design for Learning Guidelines version 3.0. Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://udlguidelines.cast.org/more/udl-goal/
Chick, J. C., Morello, L., & Vance, J. Universal Design for Learning as an Equity Framework: Addressing Educational Barriers and Enablers for Diverse Non-Traditional Learners. (2025). Education Sciences. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci15091265
Horg-Aaron, C., M. C. Vasquez, and D. Huddlestun. (2025). Disrupting, Affirming, Reflecting: How Critical Race Pedagogy Shapes Undergraduate Research for First-Generation and Racially Minoritized Students. New Directions for Community Colleges 2025, no. 209–210: 71–80. https://doi.org/10.1002/cc.70017
Jacobson, J., & Giblen, J. (2023). Intentional Tutoring: Fulfilling the UDL Promise for Historically Marginalized Students. The Learning Assistance Review, 28(2), 43.
Mt. San Jacinto College. (n.d.). Hispanic Serving Institution. Retrieved February 19, 2026, from https://msjc.edu/hsi/index.html#:~:text=San%20Jacinto%20College%20achieved%20HSI
,United%20States%20Department%20of%20Education
Mt. San Jacinto College. (n.d.). Personalized Academic Learning Skills (PALS). Retrieved February 20, 2026, from https://msjc.edu/pals/index.html
Mulcahy, C. A., & Wertz, J. A. (2020). Using Project-Based Learning to Build College and Career Readiness Among Diverse Learners. TEACHING Exceptional Children, 53(5), 341-349. https://doi-org.libproxy.lib.csusb.edu/10.1177/0040059920964833 (Original
work published 2021)
Scott, L., Temple, P., & Marshall, D. (2015). UDL in Online College Coursework: Insights of Infusion and Educator Preparedness. Online Learning (Newburyport, Mass.), 19(5), 99. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v19i5.623
About the authors
Alicia Chavira Medina (she/ her) is a current first-generation Latinx graduate student who works for the PALS program at Mt. San Jacinto College. She advocates for students’ needs, providing an academic counter-space for MSJC’s diverse student population.
Dr. Audrey Baca Lopez (she/her) is a first-generation, Latina-mama-scholar, and tenured professor at Mt. San Jacinto College. She creates academic counter-spaces using anti-racist and culturally relevant practices in transfer level English courses to expose the hidden curriculum of academia.
