Complicating Risk: First-Generation Self-Identification, Pedagogies,

and Programmatic Support

Beth Buyserie

Rachel Sanchez

Tialitha Macklin

Photo Credit: Today Online

Rewarding Partnerships: Dialogue Between Student Support Programs

and First-Year Composition

Beth Buyserie (bbuyserie@wsu.edu)Assistant Director of Composition

Washington State University

Photo Credit: Washington State University First Scholars

• CLASP: Critical Literacies Achievement and Success Program

• Weekly Student-Faculty Dialogue

• Critical Pedagogy Series for Faculty

• CLASP Partners

Campus Dialogue

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

Our Institutional Setting

Almost 40% of current class is first-generation

Identify and OutreachFG Staff, Faculty, and Students

Photo Credit: Washington State University First Scholars & Smart Start

My Story

Homeschooled

No DiplomaTalk of the

Future

Father AA

through NavySiblings &

Community

CollegeUniversity

Family Disconnect

Photo Credit: www.greenhq.net/carbon-footprint/

Isolation

“The ways in which isolation and marginalization impact students are deeply rooted in the structure of higher education. Students are welcomed to campus; they are invited to participate in a variety of programs that are often explained to them in words that make no sense, and acronyms that make even less sense. . . . For FG students, this invitation to participate often translates to an expectation to change themselves and adapt to the rules of academia” (Jehangir 33).

“the structure and function of our campuses, disciplinary homes, classroom spaces, and programs often perpetuate the very things we wish to dismantle” (Jehangir 34).

Photo Credit: www.amazon.com

Race & Class

“Class differences were boundaries no one wanted to face or talk about. It was easier to downplay them, to act as though we were all from privileged backgrounds, to work around them, . . . to pretend that just being chosen to study at such an institution mean that those of us who did not come from privilege were already in transition toward privilege.”

—bell hooks, “Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education”

p. 101

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

Meaningful Difference . . .

First-Generation Students:

“all do not have the same story, but aspects of their narratives weave together to form a pattern reflecting both the richness they bring to campuses and the obstacles they encounter in academia” (Jehangir)

. . . and Colorblindnessbbuyserie@wsu.edu

Complicating First-Gen

“We invite WSU faculty and staff who also identify as first-generation to request a free “I’m First at WSU” pin. We hope you will wear this pin at the start of the

semester to help the newest first-generation members of our Cougar community feel welcomed.”

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

Pedagogical Implications

IMPLICIT EXPECTATIONS

• What implicit expectations are in our comp classes?

• How do these expectations reinforce dominant norms?

RACE, CLASS, GENDER, and INEQUITY

andIDENTITY, COMMUNITY, and AGENCY

(Collier & Morgan; Jehangir)

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

Concluding Questions

Rewarding Partnerships

• Does my campus acknowledge and support intersections of race, class, and sexuality of FG students?

• What partnerships might I create with units that serve FGS? How would these partnerships benefit students?

• How can our partnerships reject assimilation/deficit model thinking and instead challenge existing dominant structures?

• How do my own identities contribute to this process?

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

Rewarding Partnerships: Dialogue Between Student Support Programs

and First-Year Composition

Beth Buyserie (bbuyserie@wsu.edu)

Complicating Identity: Moving Beyond the Risk of Teacher Self-Identification

Rachel Sanchez (@sanrac)

Instructor and CLASP Commons Coordinator

Washington State University

• Quick Question: How has your rhetoric and the rhetoric of those around you shaped who you are and how you are in the world?

A Rhetoric Narrative

@sanrac

Language and Life

• Sanchez? Sánchez?

• First-Gen by any other name – still just as crippled by the system (and my system)

@sanrac

Building Pedagogy

• Rhetoric Narrative – Spring 2015

• Choosing a topic

• It is smart to select a specific memory or event for this rhetoric narrative to avoid being too general in the story. Stories need to be focused and detailed. Authors might reflect on the following to choose a topic:

• An early memory about speaking that you remember

• An experience that represents the earliest tension between your primary and a secondary discourse

• The origins of the way you currently talk about a topic important to you

• An experience that demonstrates code switching

• A memory of learning the language/lexicon of a secondary discourse community

• A situation where you’ve felt isolated from a secondary discourse community/primary discourse community

@sanrac

Beginnings

• From Bootstraps, “…it is not enough to recognize and make

explicit our cultures. We need to recognize cultures in the context of other cultures, since none of us can be mono-cultural in America.”

• Over twenty years later, we’re beginning to understand how significant this is in shifting student demographic - and we’re slowly making progress

• CLASP – building composition pedagogy with a CRT framework

@sanrac

An “inextricable spot”

@sanrac

Critical Compassionate Pedagogy

• Critical Compassionate Pedagogy • “pedagogical commitment that allows educators to criticize

institutional and classroom practices that ideologically place underserved students at disadvantaged positions, while at the same time be reflexive of their actions through compassion as a daily commitment”

• - How does this pedagogy shift for those of us who identify as a member of an underserved population?

- Russell Durst’s criticism – without active student engagement, critical pedagogy does not work. Students will not challenge “status quo” when driven with need to succeed (financially, etc)

@sanrac

The Other, Identified

“…every person is at once a ‘who’ and a ‘what’ – a subject who actively participates in the making or unmaking of his or her world, and a subject who suffers and is subjected to actions by others, as well as forces of circumstances that lie largely outside his or her control” – Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling

Mi prima and a little CLASP meeting

@sanrac

Identification Processes

“…the expression on my face ‘says something’ about who I am (identity) and what I am feeling (emotions) and what group I feel I belong to (attachment), which can be ‘read’ and understood by other people, even if I didn’t intend deliberately to communicate anything as formal as ‘a message,’ and even if the other person couldn’t give a very logical account of how s/he came to understand what I was ‘saying’” – Stuart Hall

@sanrac

Role Playing and Role Making

• Role Playing – college student role (as a first-gen/underrepresented student)

• Role Making – collaborative performance of role negotiated between previous understanding of role and individual preference

• Move between role playing and role making – about power, autonomy

@sanrac

Building Composition Sequences

@sanrac

Once your research is complete, use that information to build an argumentative essay. Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Rhode Island,” for example, moves effortlessly between personal and secondary sources to develop a portrait of Rhode Island – she tries to use both factual and personal history to articulate what the state is, what it can/does offer, and how it connects to the rest of the country. The balance is a crucial one – without the personal history, it would read like a useless Wikipedia entry. Without the research, no reader (outside of Lahiri fan base) would care.

Your argument is your own to craft, based on a clear analysis of the primary and secondary research. Your argument must be clear – this essay should not read like a travel brochure. You don’t work for Pullman or WSU. Don’t write that way. As you think about how to craft your argument, consider some of the following questions. How do the contexts of the specific space (Pullman people, students, University-town dynamics, etc) change the contexts of the general place (say, the impact of student involvement on a general place like McDonalds or Starbucks)? What is significant about the relationship between the specific space and the general place? How does an understanding of the location shape an understanding of the Pullman community? These questions are just to help you get started – you don’t need to necessarily answer all these questions in your essay.

Complicating Identity: Moving Beyond the Risk of Teacher Self-Identification

Rachel Sanchez (@sanrac)

Risky Pedagogy: Using Dialogic Feedback to Encourage Student Voice in the Writing Classroom

Tialitha Macklin (@timacklin)PhD Candidate, Rhetoric and Composition

Washington State University

My Story

Photo Credit: blogs.bedfordstmartins.com

FGS Relationships

@timacklin

“difficulties in understanding professors’ expectations [are] more extensive than the problems encountered by more traditional students”

- Collier & Morgan

Problematic Response

@timacklin

“Instead of habitual, automatic reactions, our words become conscious responses based firmly on awareness of what we are perceiving, feeling, and wanting. We are led to express ourselves with honesty and clarity, while simultaneously paying others a respectful and empathetic attention”

- Marshall Rosenberg

Compassionate Response

@timacklin

• Observation• Feeling• Need• Request

CCP Components

@timacklin

Observation

@timacklin

• Class Discussions• Surveys• Conferences• Prompted Writing

• Learning Styles• Pedagogical

Accommodations

• Puzzled?

• Excited?

• Pessimistic?

• Previous Experiences?

Feeling

@timacklin

Need

@timacklin

• Praise?• Global concerns?• Editing-type

comments and symbols?

• Type?• Form?• Quantity?• Medium?• Scope?

“Make response a two-way street – or, better yet, a free-flowing highway”

-Richard Straub

Request

@timacklin

“Students who get to raise issues for responders to address will likely see the comments as less controlling than comments that are initiated solely by the teacher, according to her agenda. They might even feel encouraged to take a more active role in their work as writers”

-Richard Straub

Request

@timacklin

Request – Phase 1

Phase 1

Students must be given the opportunity and

afforded the respect to request that their

needs be met through teacher response

@timacklin

Request – Phase 1

@timacklin

Request – Phase 1

@timacklin

Request – Phase 2

Phase 2

Consider the practice of response itself as a

request from reader to writer

@timacklin

“simultaneously tentative and goal-driven [… and where] their tentativeness seemed to originate in their attempt to weigh options, toss the responsibility for making decisions back to the writer, and offering possibilities for a better text”

-Chris Anson

Request – Phase 2

@timacklin

Serving FGS

@timacklin

Questions for You

@timacklin

• What pedagogical methods do you employ to create an inclusive course atmosphere?

• Do any of you teach online? If so, what are the specific challenges of incorporating inclusivity into a digital environment?

Risky Pedagogy: Using Dialogic Feedback to Encourage Student Voice in the Writing Classroom

Tialitha Macklin (@timacklin)

Complicating Risk: First-Generation Self-Identification, Pedagogies,

and Programmatic Support

bbuyserie@wsu.edu

@sanrac

@timacklin

References

Anson, Chris M. “Response Styles and Ways of Knowing.” Writing and Response: Theory, Practice, and Research. Ed. Chris M Anson. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1989. 322–366. Print.

Burkland, Jill, and Nancy Grimm. “Motivating through Responding.” Journal of Teaching Writing 5.2 (1986): 237–247. Print.

Collier, Peter J., and David L. Morgan. “‘Is That Paper Really Due Today?’: Differences in First-Generation and Traditional College Students’ Understandings of Faculty Expectations.” Higher Education 55.4 (2007): 425–446. Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

Connors, Robert J., and Andrea Lunsford. “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers.” College Composition and Communication 44.2 (1993): 200–223. Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Continuum, 2000. Print.

Hall, Stuart. “Introduction.” Introduction. Representation. London: Sage, 2013. N.pag. Print.

References

Hao, Richie Neil. “Critical Compassionate Pedagogy and the Teacher’s Role in First-Generation Student Success.” New Directions for Teaching & Learning 127.127 (2011): 91–98. Web.

hooks, bell. "Keeping Close to Home: Class and Education." Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory. Eds. Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay. Amherst: University of Massachusetts P, 1993. 99-111.

Jackson, Michael. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, University of Copenhagen, 2002. Print.

Jehangir, Rashné Rustom. Higher Education and First-Generation Students: Cultivating Community, Voice, and Place for the New Majority. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Johnson-Shull, Lisa, and Sheri Rysdam. “Taken at Our Word: Making a Fundamental Agreement When Responding to Student Writing.” Issues in Writing 19.1 (2012): 25–41. Print.

North, Stephen M. “The Idea of a Writing Center.” College English 46.5 (1984): 433–446. Print.

References

Rosenberg, Marshall. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 2nd ed. Encinitas, CA: Puddle Dancer Press, 2003. Print.

Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33.2 (1982): 148-156. Print.

Sperling, Melanie. “Constructing the Perspective of Teacher-as-Reader: A Framework for Studying Response to Student Writing.” Research in the Teaching of English 28.2 (1994): 175–207. Print.

Straub, Richard. “Guidelines for Responding to Student Writing.” Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. Ed. Duane H. Roen et al. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2002. 355–365. Print.

---. “Response Rethought.” College Composition and Communication 48.2 (1997): 277–283. Print.

---. “Students’ Reactions to Teacher Comments: An Exploratory Study.” Research in the Teaching of English 31.1 (1997): 91–119. Print.

---. The Practice of Response: Strategies for Commenting on Student Writing. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2000. Print.