This article was
originally published in the March/April, 2014 issue of Change, a
magazine dealing with contemporary issues in higher education. In it, I draw from and build on my book Back
to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education. This week, Back to School comes out in
paperback.
Also
this week, in synch with Labor Day, the radio show On Being is
rebroadcasting an interview I did on The
Mind at Work. You can access the show here. If you’ve never
listened to On Being (formerly called Speaking of Faith), you
might want to check it out. The host,
Krista Tippett, is a thoughtful interviewer, and the range of topics and guests
is terrific—last week’s guest was the incomparable political and social
activist Grace Lee Boggs.
Here
is the article from Change.
***
“You
might discover somebody you never knew you were,” Henry says with a big voice as
he turns his wheelchair sideways to look at me. “That’s basically what happened
to me when I started taking classes here.”
Henry
is finishing up his general education requirements for his associate of arts
degree and is preparing to transfer to a university. His goal is to work in
mediation and conflict resolution, particularly with teenagers, kids like he
once was, who are “searching for an identity.”
Henry
is in his mid-twenties—a vibrant, self-reflective guy who was an honor-roll
student and athlete in high school. Then, as he put it, he started doing
“young, foolish, dumb stuff,” got caught with marijuana on campus, was
expelled, returned to graduate, and then was drawn further into gang life,
resulting in prison time and, soon after release, the shooting that paralyzed
him.
The
year after the shooting was filled with hospitals and rehab centers and
attempts to put his life back together. He returned to his parents’ house and
spent long days thinking, watching television, surfing the web. Then one day,
and he’s not sure exactly how, he stumbled across the website for the community
college he now attends.
When Henry was on
the streets, “college was the last thing on my mind,” but now the images on the
screen stirred him. All kinds of thoughts went through his mind about his purpose
and goals and how to turn his life around. “I don’t have the use of my legs,”
he said, “but I have the use of my mind.”
The
community college Henry found that day is geared toward occupational training,
and he began by studying a trade. As part of his financial-aid package, he got
a work-study job as a receptionist at the campus tutoring center—and that job
led to further revelations.
Being around “so
many great and positive people who were in the process of transferring” to the
university led Henry to discover “that I didn’t want to just get an
occupational certificate and call it quits. I decided ‘I wanna take English
courses. I wanna take general education courses.’ And that’s where it all
started for me.”
Henry
is one of about fifty students I observed and interviewed during the two years
I spent at a community college serving one of the poorest populations in Los
Angeles County, in order to write Back to
School. Though most of the students I got to know were not physically
disabled to the degree Henry was, many lived in hardship and were going through
or had gone through a period of self-discovery. They were trying to get their
lives together, make something of themselves, find out why God put them on this
earth—the expressions varied, but the general goal of trying to start a new phase
of life was pretty much the same.
I
sat in on classes in remedial mathematics and English and in five occupational
programs: welding, diesel technology, electrical construction and maintenance,
nursing, and fashion design. I also interviewed students who, like Henry, were
preparing to transfer. I spent hours in the tutorial center, where I got a
sense of the subjects and assignments that were most challenging to students
and the kinds of assistance they most needed.
During
observations in the occupational programs, there was ample opportunity to talk with
students while they worked on an engine or were in the middle of constructing a
garment. Such talk provided a more direct entry than formal interviews did to their
attitudes, motivators, habits, struggles, and successes, as well as how they
were developing a sense of competence and of their identities as nurses or
diesel mechanics.
I
also conducted formal and informal interviews with the teachers, tutors, and
mid- and high-level administrators who were responsible for these courses and
programs. The interviews with teachers provided a wealth of information about
subject matter and students, confirming or qualifying those students’ own sense
of how they were doing. The interviews with administrators provided the broader
institutional context in which students and faculty do their work.
Finally,
I simply spent a lot of time walking around the campus, sitting in various open
spaces, waiting outside of classrooms. You see and hear so much: students
passing by in the middle of a conversation about problems at home (a nursing
student fretting about her husband’s displeasure at the demands on her time),
or a delay in financial aid that’s making it impossible to buy books, or the
elements of popular culture that circulate through this student body.
This multi-layered
approach enabled me to get a sense of the lives of students like Henry as they
are lived out in classes and workshops, in student services and other
institutional settings, and in the campus as a social world. I saw the actual
process of education unfolding in real time.
The
students I got to know were certainly enrolled to improve their economic
prospects, but they were there for many other reasons as well. They wanted to
do something good for themselves and their families. They wanted to be better
able to help their kids with school. They wanted to have another go at education
and change what it meant to them. They wanted to learn new things and to gain a
sense—and the certification—of competence. They wanted to redefine who they were.
***
I saw the
intricate interconnection of the three planes of students’ existence: personal,
academic, and social. I observed students who were learning all kinds of things
about themselves as they confronted the tasks and problems in their curriculum—what
they liked or didn’t like, how they responded to a challenge, and so forth. I
saw students who thought they were stupid because of their earlier school
records—particularly in subjects like math or science—begin to rethink that
assessment as they found they could do math or science either in basic courses
or in the context of an occupational program.
In the occupational
programs I visited, students were continually interacting with each other:
learning by watching a peer prepare an IV tube, or lending a hand as another
student was sewing a garment, or jointly working on an electrical assembly.
Students were developing trade skills but also learning how to work with others
and discovering what collaboration could yield.
Because of the
demographics of this campus, those working together sometimes came from racial
or ethnic groups that would have made them hostile to each other on the street.
But the cooperative interaction around challenging tasks frequently overrode
that hostility, at times even leading to insight about the racial and ethnic
dynamics in this part of the city.
A number of
students I met who were preparing to transfer to a four-year college or
university told stories of self-discovery similar to Henry’s. They began by
taking a course or two, and as they began to experience achievement and become
engaged by particular topics and readings, they also began to imagine a
different, more successful future for themselves.
The cognitive
momentum they’d developed through their curriculum was beginning to have a
significant effect on their sense of self, which, in turn, played back into the
courses they took, the effort they gave to them, and the shaping of a goal to
transfer. All of this led them to new acquaintances who shared their interests
and reinforced their commitment. I was reminded of Marcia Baxter Magolda’s
studies of self-authorship, a notion less commonly invoked with students like
these than with traditional-aged students.
To be sure, this
campus had students in their late teens and early twenties, but it also had a
lot of students from their mid-to-late twenties into their fifties. We tend to
assume that older students are more goal-oriented and practical than
traditional-aged students. The implication is that the kinds of discovery and
growth experienced by traditional students is not likely happen for the older
folks, who are coming back to school more fully formed, with specific
employment and career goals in mind.
There is some
truth to this characterization, but I also found that remarkable things can
happen to older students as they make their way through college. I talked with students
like Henry who—through the classes they were taking and their interactions with
faculty, staff, and other students—were reassessing their abilities, discovering
new interests, and gaining insight into the personal beliefs or social norms
that restricted them. That nursing student whose husband was giving her trouble
was typical of those returning women who were beginning to confront gender
roles, and not only because of something they read in a course but also because
they began to experience themselves in a new way—in classes, with peers, on
campus.
Even though all
the students on this campus were commuters and had obligations that kept many
of them from participating in extracurricular activities, they did find
important participatory spaces in tutoring centers, computer labs, workshops,
and the like. These academic resources provide a hugely important service in
assisting students develop academic and occupational skills, but they also
serve as social spaces, with the academic work providing the occasion for
social contact.
While some
students came by the tutoring center only in times of crisis, others came more
regularly, forging relations with tutors and experiencing the center as a
hospitable place. Learning was humanized for them.
In the tutoring
center, I was struck by how many students were being helped with so many
different tasks and problems, from narrowing a topic for a psychology paper, to
navigating the Internet, to selecting classes, to letting off steam about
problems with work schedules or transportation. Some of these fell squarely
within the center’s mandate, some less so, but all contributed to students’
making their way through the college.
Henry’s growing
awareness that he wanted to expand his education into the liberal arts was
helped along by the fact that in the center, he was surrounded by people—students
and tutors alike—who looked like him and were studying, talking, and puzzling
things through. Henry saw there other students with street and prison tattoos,
with disabilities, with various indicators that their lives had not been easy.
And they were all in the midst of this vibrant educational environment,
experiencing themselves as legitimate citizens of it.
The distinction
between the academic and the occupational curriculum is status laden. The
assumption—sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit—is that the academic course of
study is the domain of intellectual growth, of insight and imagination, and of
big ideas, whereas occupational programs, though perhaps challenging, are baldly
functional.
But what I saw day
to day in the occupational programs I visited complicated this easy
distinction. There was the continual demand to solve problems, to apply
knowledge, to slow down and think something through. Students needed to not
only learn to use a tool or a process but know why it worked and how.
And there was excitement
about new knowledge. After a field trip to a state-of-the-art welding shop, one
student said he found all the new advances “overwhelming. … There is so much
more to know.” But he added quickly that the trip “motivated” him, for he
“loves this stuff.”
In the technical
classes I saw an ample display and refining of aesthetic sensibilities. As
students got more proficient and socialized into various craft traditions, they
would talk about the beauty of an assembly, how the graceful bend of conduit is
“pretty.” Students would re-do perfectly functional wiring that no one would
see because it was “ugly.” Aesthetic judgment motivated action, became a reason
in itself to master a technique.
An ethics of
practice also emerged with growing competence. There was a right and a wrong
way to do things. “A bridge is only as strong as its weakest weld,” I heard an instructor
tell her students. “You’re like a surgeon, but you’re working on metal. You’re
taking two separate entities and making them one. So take it to heart.”
For a number of
students, progress through a program brought a sense of agency and fulfillment,
especially important to those who had poor school records and were casting
about. Students talked about the pleasure of being about to build or repair
something, of finally being able to create a beautiful garment or care for the
sick.
And for some, like
Henry, success in an occupational program became a kind of scholastic launching
pad, showing them, sometimes to their great surprise, that they could thrive in
school and wanted more of it. “You will grow in a way,” one young woman mused,
“that you never in your mind would imagine.”
***
Not just freshmen
at Yale but also returning students at the central-city or semi-rural community
college can experience the intellectual surprise of discovering a new field,
realize that the way they have thought about themselves is a barrier to growth,
form new relationships that open up both cognitive and social worlds. These
experiences might happen in quite different ways and have quite different
consequences, but they happen.
We need to listen
to these students and be their advocates. If policymakers are blind to them
because we haven’t done an adequate job of making them visible, then the
institutional conditions to foster their growth won’t be created and funded.
And that would have a direct effect on the students we saw in the tutoring
center, the welding shop, and the nursing program—on a future Henry trying to
discover who he is and could be.
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