Comp teachers at Community colleges in the midwest

1. Comp teachers at Community colleges in the midwest What Might “class silence” suggest about teaching space?

2. What is theoretically innovative and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originaryand initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies—singular or communal—that initiate new signs of identity” • BhabhaThe Location of Culture

3. Opening Remarks • Class definitions, subject positions, and the role of the researcher and student

4. Class and Risk of Stopping Out • The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has identified seven risk factors associated with reduced likelihood of persisting through college and earning a degree: being independent, attending part-time, working fulltime while enrolled, having dependents, being a single parent, delaying entry to college, and not having a traditional high school diploma. (Corrigan, 2003)

5. Rights to Cite Disclaimer • Provisional and proprietary analysis of pilot researchin design phase of dissertation project (may not cite) • All names are pseudonyms • 3 instructors, 3 interview protocols • Informed by literature in Higher Education and in Composition Studies

6. The Interviews Three kinds of interviews conducted in the orienting phase of this project. Each approach helped me to hone my understanding and to generate more specific steps and focus for final, three-phase research project • Judy: • Nearing retirement, full-time, Caucasian • Open-structured interview, informal, untaped • Field notes and member-checking by written correspondence • Patricia • Early career, experienced, full-time, Caucasian, female • Recorded and transcribed • Delaney • First-year at community college, Caucasian, female • Interview by email in concert with task-based analysis of syllabus

7. Participant Details

8. Codes Overview of codes (handout)

9. Codes at a Glance • 19 codes • 7 descriptive categories: • “Basic Information • “Contextual Constraints,” • “Instructor Perceptions,” • “Teaching Goals,” • “Tensions in Teaching,” and • “Influences on Teaching Approaches”.

10. Frequent codes Initial Analysis. I am currently re-tweaking interview questions for dissertation • “Approaches to Teaching” (13)and “Explicit Tensions” (20) (Tensions in Teaching), • “Students described,” (9, Instructor perceptions), • “College Writing Course Goals” (16, Teaching Goals), • “Theoretical and Scholarly influences” (10) “Colleague Community Influences” (6) “Administrative Influences” (5) and “Professional and Scholarly Participation Influences” (4) (Influences on Teaching Approaches) • Table of codes available upon request.

11. Explicit “Class” • Class did not” naturally” emerge in any discussions about instructors’ experiences, the goals of community colleges,or about perceptions of students. • The one exception is in the third interview where I asked the instructor to identify herself in terms of race, gender, class. • “Similar background increases rapport: first generation, working class.” --Delaney

12. Implicit “Class” • Class emerged through implicit descriptions as “diversity”, as “college knowledge,” and as a function of work / personal obstacles to success. • Class emerged in the conflict between the community college mission and the goals and challenges of teaching college-level writing • Access for all!! • Enrollment for all? • How to teach all?

13. Course Goals: Community College • “Once you teach in a community college for a couple of years you recognize that in first-year composition, at least probably, maybe half is generous, but about half your job is to get people into the mindset about what it means to be a college student, . . . Which complicates teaching writing.” Patricia

14. Perceived Differences in Institutional Missions • “Access, affordability, community outreach, life-long learning, and a learner-centered focus rather than a teacher-centered one” -Delaney

15. Course Goals for College-Level Writing • “To prepare students for the rigors of academic writing, expose them to writing across different genres, introduce them to the concept of ethical research and writing as a process.” –Delaney • Focus on academic argument rather than personal narrative (which was associated with what 4-year institutions teach)- Patricia

16. Explicit Tensions • Instructors persistently identified “challenges” and “tensions” between the goals for community college education—open access– and the act of teaching the diversity of students that such access makes possible. • All instructors agreed this was the most difficult aspect of their jobs. • All instructors felt underappreciated or recognized • All instructors looked outside the field of composition for pedagogical theories that would help with “our students”

17. Barrier Invisibility • Students from low-income families were no more likely than their higher-income families to report financial burdens as contributing to their choice to leave (Corrigan, 2003). • Judy described “personal reasons” as the main reason students give for choosing to leave.

18. Hypothesis? • By continuing to allow class to remain invisible and unheard in conversations about student access, learning, and teaching, we fail to provide both students and instructors an opportunity to nominalize the barriers they experience as “personal.”

19. Troubling Faculty “Class” • Research on academic labor and social history (Hendricks, 2005) , the high percentage of contingent, part-time faculty (Anson & Jewell, 2001), and the overall greater visibility of narratives from working-class-middle-class hybrid academics pokes holes in the notion that middle class teachers are teaching working class students how to “pass” in “our language.” • Peckham points estimates 30% of writing faculty are working class, and it is hard to estimate what percentge are those homeless “straddlers” of limbo

20. Theoretical Framework: Identities are shaped by Context and Situation • Traditional categories of identity may not afford an appropriate complexity for understanding the ways identities become enacted within specific situations and spaces. (I look to Goffman) • Alsup suggests that teaching identities evolve in relation to specific social situations, expectations, and perceptions. (Her work relies on Gee’s notion of identity discourses and on identity as socially-constructed and enacted.)

21. Third Space as “in-betweeness” • “The importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (Bhabha, 1990)

22. Embedded Spaces • The Community Colleges Pedagogical Space • as Borderland, in-between high school and college (Tinberg, 2005) • As vocational and / or academic / or community education • Composition / Writing as third space • Faculty also occupy a Third “space”: • Undervalued among academics (Grubb, Kelly-Kleese), misunderstood by students (Cox) and communities (participants)

23. Identity as Situated / Identity as In-between • Perhaps more nuanced understandings of social identity and of power dynamics might offer a way to think about identity and power. • Interrupt the Middle class/ Working class originary narratives that pits instructors as the ferrymen over the river for students who “don’t know how.” )

24. Implications • By recognizing and attending to the various and hybrid class and power positions of instructors instructors, we may help to make more visible the precarious balance upon which these hybrid performances are navigated. • Interrogate the assumptions about writing that contribute to deficit model pedaogogies, • allow for conversationsin the classroom about adjustment • Generate Conversations about instructional empowerment (e. g. adjunct unions) and greater solidarity—and freedom for autonomy—for faculty in general

25. Thank you! For questions, copies of materials, citations, please contact: Brett Griffiths Bgriff@umich.edu

26. Comp teachers at Community colleges in the midwest What Might “class silence” suggest about teaching space?

29. Work-master • “Among those students who do work, low-income students work more hours on average (Figure 3.1). Among dependents, 23 percent of low income students work full-time, compared with 13 percent of higher-income students. Thirty percent of low-income independents supporting a family work fulltime in addition to attending classes. Although many low-income students attend part-time while working, the significant number of hours they work contributes to the persistence challenges they face.” (Corrigan, 2003)

30. Work stats--master • Less than 10 percent of low-income independents with dependents attend baccalaureate-granting institutions. • Low-income dependents, although more likely than independents to attend four-year institutions, still are more likely to attend public two-year and for-profit institutions than middle- and upper-income dependents. • Low-income dependent students are no more likely than middle- and upper-income dependents to cite financial considerations in choosing their institution. (Corrigan, 2003)