Ok, so maybe I am just a working-class schmuck, but does that mean I can't have a thought, or an opinion, or be taught, or get a higher degree? No, it doesn't, but the way we treat first-generation college students often has them running for the door even before their first year is over. But why is this?
Renny Christopher, author of "New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education," quotes Lee Warren, arguing that "working-class students don't know how to 'work the system . . . They feel unwelcome . . . They are afraid of being found out.' Further, working-class students' identities and family relations are subject to great stresses when they enter college" (212-13). I guess here is where I confess that I know this first hand. I was lucky though. I started out in a community college where working-class students have a better change of success than they do if they begin in a 4-year institute.
But it still took me 17 years to earn my bachelors degree. When you are a working-class student, tuition doesn't come easy. I made it through the first three years without a break. I was doing great, good grades. But when the beginning of that fourth year came around, I couldn't afford it. So I took a semester off and then started back again. I made it through that semester before the money ran out again. From there it was a downhill spiral.
Christopher's article discusses the need, once more, for a working-class pedagogy: one that meets the students where they are and uses a more collaborative teaching style. Often "the academic world is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to first-generation students, and that it demands that students from the working class deny their past, dissociate themselves from their families, and remake themselves in its own image in order to 'earn' a place within it" (216).
It is time to end the "gatekeeper" form of education and empower "students' learning by bringing the academic environment of the classroom into a sphere where the students already feel empowered, orality: deemphasizing the authority of the instructor, allowing students to engage in teaching and learning from one another: meeting students where they are; and allowing them to perform out of strengths, rather than out of disadvantages" (Christopher 218).
Renny Christopher, author of "New Working-Class Studies in Higher Education," quotes Lee Warren, arguing that "working-class students don't know how to 'work the system . . . They feel unwelcome . . . They are afraid of being found out.' Further, working-class students' identities and family relations are subject to great stresses when they enter college" (212-13). I guess here is where I confess that I know this first hand. I was lucky though. I started out in a community college where working-class students have a better change of success than they do if they begin in a 4-year institute.
But it still took me 17 years to earn my bachelors degree. When you are a working-class student, tuition doesn't come easy. I made it through the first three years without a break. I was doing great, good grades. But when the beginning of that fourth year came around, I couldn't afford it. So I took a semester off and then started back again. I made it through that semester before the money ran out again. From there it was a downhill spiral.
Christopher's article discusses the need, once more, for a working-class pedagogy: one that meets the students where they are and uses a more collaborative teaching style. Often "the academic world is at best indifferent and at worst openly hostile to first-generation students, and that it demands that students from the working class deny their past, dissociate themselves from their families, and remake themselves in its own image in order to 'earn' a place within it" (216).
It is time to end the "gatekeeper" form of education and empower "students' learning by bringing the academic environment of the classroom into a sphere where the students already feel empowered, orality: deemphasizing the authority of the instructor, allowing students to engage in teaching and learning from one another: meeting students where they are; and allowing them to perform out of strengths, rather than out of disadvantages" (Christopher 218).
RSS Feed
