Coming Back to School: What Returning Students Can Teach Us About Learning and Development

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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One More Round on Non-Traditional College Students: Teaching Matters

Sparked by the article in the June Atlantic Monthly, “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” my last three entries on this blog have dealt with teaching non-traditional college students and, more specifically, with teaching literature and remedial writing. Readers responded with close to 35 comments, many of them long, all of them thoughtful. Collectively, they contained assignments and techniques, anecdotes drawn from personal and professional experience, educational philosophies and thoughts about the social order. In sum, they contained a great deal of the wisdom of the classroom.

I want to dwell on that on-the-ground wisdom, for we don’t get much of it in policy deliberations about remediation in college or about education in general. And, as I wrote in a previous entry, we tend to get a pretty dreary and dispiriting rendering of non-traditional students and remediation in the media. Witness the Atlantic Monthly article.

So let’s go to the readers’ comments.

They display a commitment to teaching (some from people new to the game, others in it for more than thirty years) and an affinity for writing, books, literacy. Together, the writers of these comments offer a wealth of suggestions on authors to use and how to use them, on assignments and the sequencing of assignments, on ways to play back and forth between speech and written text and among and across books and stories from very different times and places. Reading these suggestions – some of which are embedded in descriptions of teaching – you get a feel for the intellectual sizzle of these teachers’ classrooms.

Related to the above is a refreshing discussion of culture, teaching, and learning that emerges in the collective comments. The writers sometimes disagree with each other, but in the aggregate you read people thinking hard about how to understand and honor the complex cultural backgrounds of their students while not reductively defining them by those backgrounds alone.

So, too, there is a rich discussion of social class and education. There is mention of economics and who gets what kind of education, both before and during college, the funding, the resources available. And there is a good deal of discussion about the toll some students’ class backgrounds have taken on their current levels of skill. But this poor academic preparation is not a cognitive prison house, and the writers offer powerful testimony to the achievements of underprepared students, given the right conditions. (This general issue of social class and achievement is an especially important one to me, and I plan to devote a future entry to it.)

It was interesting how many writers speculate about the likely education of the author of the Atlantic article. Professor X’s discontent might well originate in his own graduate study in English, study that typically includes little serious training in teaching, particularly teaching literature to a wide sweep of humanity. Such narrow graduate education will affect the kinds of intellectual relationships a teacher is able to foster.

And I was struck by – and savored – the feel for teaching you get reading these thirty-plus comments. The detail ranges from the specific technique and strategy (reading a paragraph from “Araby” in multiple voices), to long-haul reflection on the purpose of education, to the pleasures of the work itself. “I love to pull my teaching cart out into the dark, smelling the trees and flowers that are now only shadows,” writes a community college instructor, “knowing that I and my students are tired from doing something worthwhile.”

Some of the students in the courses taught by these teachers will struggle and not do well – though I’d bet those students will be treated with dignity and with an eye toward their future development. And some students will do just fine, and from the comments we get a sense of their resilience and ability. We also get a sense of teaching as a subtle and humane art.

All of this takes us back inside the basement of the Ivory Tower and enables us to rethink what might go on in that basement and, for that fact, how the basement might be closer – might be made closer – to the rest of the tower itself.

More on Teaching "Non-Traditional" (Or Any) Students, With a Focus on James Joyce's "Araby"

There was a lot of thought-provoking response to my last entry (“On Portraying the ‘Non-Traditional’ College Student”), and so I would like to continue the discussion this week.

A number of people who posted, and some who contacted me outside of the blog, wrote letters to Atlantic Monthly about the article (“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower,” by Professor X). I wrote one too. Editors will typically select a small number of the letters they receive – looking for representative ones, brief ones, ones that can be readily edited for the space available. So let me open this blog to those who want to post their letters here, published or not, once the July (but probably August) issue of the Atlantic Monthly comes out.

Now to this week’s entry. I am also going to try to tie in some of the response to my “The Personal is Cognitive: The Human Side of Learning” from the week before last.

What I would like to do this week is to think on paper about teaching – the art and strategy of it – and to do so by focusing on a single short story, James Joyce’s “Araby,” one mentioned by Professor X in his “Basement…” article.

“Araby,” the third story in Joyce’s Dubliners, has become part of the Western literary canon, a familiar entry in a zillion anthologies and syllabi. It was on the Humanities 1-B syllabus I was given to teach 30 years ago. Though a classic, it is arguably too much of its time, place, and language for many to connect with. Professor X writes that his students “fidget…yawn…and grimace” upon first encounter. I’m sure I’m not alone in wondering why Professor X didn’t select or substitute other stories.

So let’s think about teaching, using “Araby” as an object to turn and turn in our hands and heads, considering through it the teaching of literature – or any subject, for that matter – from a number of perspectives.

First, a refresher. “Araby” is set in Joyce’s dreary Early-Twentieth Century Dublin and is narrated in the first person by an adolescent boy who is thoroughly infatuated with the older sister of one of his pals. The boy’s language is rich, fervid, and his description of his friend’s sister is flat-out rapturous. Though he watches her from afar and only directly encounters her once in the story, “…my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires.” You get the idea.

The defining moment in the story begins to develop when the girl, in that single encounter, expresses regret that she can’t go to Araby, the bazaar that’s in town, and our narrator, emboldened, says he will go and bring her something. After an agony of waiting for his drunken uncle to come home with a few shillings, the boy rushes to Araby, arriving at closing time. It is as dreary a place as the city surrounding it. He finds an open booth, eyes vases and tea sets, feels the few coins in his pocket, and realizes suddenly, painfully, the foolhardiness of his desire and quest. “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity,” the story ends, “and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

So let’s say, I, you, or Professor X might want to teach “Araby.” There are a lot of questions to consider in selecting any piece of literature for a syllabus. Certainly, one’s own pleasure with the text matters – it enlivens the teaching – but there needs to be further justification, since teaching literature means reading a story or poem with others to some pedagogical end, a social intellectual activity.

Here in three overlapping parts, three cycles or lines of sight, are some of the things I might think about as I consider assigning “Araby.”

I.

I’d ask myself what it is I want to achieve through teaching the story: what about literature and the appreciation of it, or about the structure of the short story, or about Joyce and his Dublin, or about symbolism and imagery, or about the cadence of a sentence, or about imagination and longing, or about conceptions of romance and gender, or….And I’d ask these questions if I were teaching “Araby” to a group of high schoolers or to a graduate seminar in English – though, of course, the specifics of what I did in each classroom would be different.

I’d intersect such questions with what I know about the students before me, high schoolers to advanced graduate students. Some of what I know comes from their location in the system: Were there prerequisite courses? What have they already been reading for me? And some of what I know is provided by their performance, by discussion in class, by tests or papers, by comments made in conference. And some of what I know emerges via relation, through what I try to make a respectful engagement with them as people with histories, interests and curiosities, hopes for the future.

II.

That last point about considering the histories of the people in the class brings into focus another set of, not unrelated, questions, questions about the politics and sociology of what gets selected into literary canons, of what authors get read. So I’d be asking myself: Does my syllabus reflect in some way, to some degree the cultural histories and practices of the students before me, particularly if those histories and practices have typically been absent from the curriculum? There can be great pedagogical power here, and all of us who have taught literature have seen it: Students lighting up when they read stories with familiar languages, geographies, family scenes, cultural practices that they haven’t read before in a classroom. This point was made nicely in several posts. Given this perspective, and depending on who was in my class, I might take a pass on “Araby.” I know that when I first read the story as a college freshman, it seemed as flat and distant as could be.

But culture is a complex business, as is teaching, and a cautionary note was raised in last week’s posts. While being responsive to our students’ cultural histories and practices, we have to be mindful of how easily “culture” can be narrowed and reduced as we try to define it. Given the tendency in our society (discussed at other times in this blog) toward either/or thinking and one-dimensional answers to complex educational questions, the point is worth emphasizing. As expressed in one post, there is “no monolithic us,” no blanket African-American, or working-class, or Puerto Rican culture, and thus no ready match-up to writers from these backgrounds. Black kids won’t automatically respond to Alice Walker. How a story of hers is taught becomes a key variable. This seems obvious, I know, but it can slip away from us.

So maybe “Araby” shouldn’t be ruled out of court….

III.

Which leads me to the third line of sight I’d take when considering “Araby.” And that is my own experience with the story: as an underprepared college freshman from a working-class background, as someone who later taught “Araby,” and as a middle-aged man reading it once again, just before composing this entry.

As I noted a moment ago, I didn’t like or get “Araby” the first time I read it. Though I had a terrific senior high school English teacher – a guy who turned my life around – and some wonderful teachers later in college, my college Freshman English instructor was awful. As I subsequently learned more about literary technique in general, and Joyce in particular, and especially as I had to eventually teach “Araby” myself, I came to appreciate it. And reading the story a few days ago – thinking back to my own adolescence – it touched me deeply.

I take a few lessons from this brief survey of my own time with “Araby.”

The first lesson has to do with how I missed completely in my freshman year the overlay of the story with my own experience. Like the narrator, I too lived in a sad and taxing place and sought release in my imagination. And, like him, I had a desperate and unrequited crush – in my case on a waitress in the Mexican restaurant down the street. My heart too picked up speed just walking past the front window, hoping that she was at the counter. The important point here, I think, is that we sometimes don’t see connection or relevance automatically, readily. This could be a place where artful teaching comes in.

Teaching also comes in, of course, in understanding literary technique, the way “Araby” works as a story: the structure of the thing, the boy’s hyperbolic language, the small touches that mean so much. I remember not getting the ending at all: how did we go so quickly from looking at vases and jingling a few coins in the pocket to the crashing “my eyes burned with anguish and anger”? But a little guided reflection on that ending would have revealed a powerful truth, surely known to me at 19, and, for that fact, to all the folks in Professor X’s literature class: that our hopes are sometimes dashed through the smallest thing – an overheard remark, a glance away, an opportunity missed by a minute or two.

If I did elect to teach “Araby,” I would probably be considering in hindsight what didn’t happen with me upon first encounter – which provides another way to think about how to open the story up to others.

I invite the readers of this blog to pipe in, to continue thinking with me about teaching – teaching a story like “Araby”… or any of the other issues about teaching raised in my last few entries.

On Portraying the “Non-Traditional” College Student

Since I began this blog a few months back, we have been discussing the purpose of schooling, particularly, but not solely, public education, K-12. This week, I would like to shift the focus to a different population, though the issue of the purpose of education is still involved.

Several people forwarded to me an article that appeared in the June Atlantic Monthly entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.” It offers a disheartening portrait of the “non-traditional” (or “remedial” or just run-of-the-mill) college student, a portrait common in mass media, and in high-brow media particularly.

The author, who is identified as “Professor X”, teaches Freshman Composition and Introduction to Literature at a community college and a small private college. His courses are required, and his students, by his description, are people “who must amass a certain number of credits before they can become police officers or state troopers, lower-echelon health-care workers who need credits to qualify for raises, and municipal employees who require college-level certification to advance at work.”

The purpose of the piece is to challenge the notion that everyone should have access to post-secondary education, and the professor supports his claim with a narrative of student incompetence. His students can’t write about Joyce’s “Araby” or Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”. They can’t write a research paper “elucidat[ing] the positions of scholars on two sides of a historical controversy. Why did Truman remove MacArthur? Did the United States covertly support the construction of the Berlin Wall?” They haven’t read a book in common. And so it goes.

The professor doesn’t come across as a bad guy, and he frets over the grades he must dole out. But what is so frustrating to people like me, certainly to those who told me about the article, is that the professor seems clueless about alternative ways to engage his students in the humanities and help them become more effective critical readers and writers. Nor does he seem to grant them much experience or intelligence that could be brought to bear on core topics in the humanities.

What troubles me more than Professor X’s particular narrative of failure is how frequently this type of story appears in magazines like Atlantic Monthly. We’ve discussed mass media in this blog before – and I am certainly not in the business of bashing the media – but it’s telling that such portraits come from academics or visiting journalists whose educational experience is, I’ll bet, quite different from the students before them. Their stance is one of shock or dismay or cynicism rather than curiosity and engagement. And their portrayals help shape public opinion about an issue and a population much more complex than their weary depictions suggest.

It is certainly accurate that a number of people do enter higher education poorly prepared. And we do need to think hard about what the current push for “college for all” truly means, how it can be enacted in an effective way, and whether or not it offers the best remedy for past educational inequality. These are important questions. Articles like “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” don’t help us answer them.