Making It Factors that Promote Resilience in First Generation College Students

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Making It Factors that Promote Resilience in
First Generation College Students

• NCTT Winter WorkshopSan Francisco - January 12,
  2007

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"What happens to a dream deferred?Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?Langston Hughes

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In Urban Areas

• Nearly 50 or 60 percent of adolescents leave high
  school prior to graduation with neither degree
  nor diploma.
• 43 of men return for a GED
• 25 of women return for a GED

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Risk and Resilience

• The structure of schooling with its high
  regard for the cultural capital of the upper
  classes, promotes a belief among working-class
  students that they are unlikely to achieve
  academic success. Thus, there is a correlation
  between objective probabilities and subjective
  aspirations, between institutional structures and
  cultural practices. (MacLeod, p. 13)

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Low-Income Adults

• Fifty-four percent of low-income adult students
  are single parents.  Among middle- to
  upper-income adult students, the figure is 21
  percent.
• Fifty-seven percent of low-income adult students
  work full time.
• Forty-five percent of low-income adult students
  are enrolled half time or less.

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Low-Income Adults

• Fifty-three percent of low-income adult students
  attend community colleges.
• In 1995-1996, 47 percent of low-income adult
  students aspired to earn a bachelor's degree,
  and, by 2001, 7 percent had succeeded. During the
  same time, 20 percent of low-income adults said
  they desired an associate's degree, and by 2001 8
  percent had reached their goal.
• Forty percent of adult students, about 2.5
  million, made less than 25,000 in 1999-2000
  
• American Council on Education and Lumina
  Foundation Report

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Mrs. Smith Mrs. Jones
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Resilience
Resilience encompasses diverse and complex
phenomena. Understanding resilience is going to
require sustained efforts by many investigators
with different perspectives and expertise. ..
(Masten, 1994, p. 21).
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Resilience
Resilience research, like many areas of social
science, needs serious attention given to theory
building that focuses on understanding the causal
structures and processes that give meaning and
direction to social life. Further accumulation of
new or redundant data that we do not know how to
interpret will simply cause stagnation in the
research tradition. (Rigsby, 1994, p. 94)
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Risk and Resilience

• Rather than deny the existence of barriers to
  success the schools should acknowledge them
  explicitly while motivating students by teaching
  them for example, about local figures (with whom
  the students can identify) who share the
  students' socioeconomic origins but overcame the
  odds. Teachers can strive to include material
  about which the students, drawing on the skills
  they have developed in their neighborhoods, are
  the experts. (MacLeod, p. 153)

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Resilience in Popular Culture

• Although some people are unable to recover from
  illness, disappointment, or bad luck, others can
  rebound from a hurricane of difficult times. This
  ability to cope with physical and psychological
  strain or damage, which the writer calls the
  bounce-back factor, exists in a potential form
  within each person. Factors that promote
  resilience are healthy living cultivation of
  open-mindedness, a sense of humor, and other
  positive ways of thinking and strong social
  connections. Prevention (Rodale, 1988, p. 90)

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Resilience in Popular Culture

• Resilience, the ability to withstand both
  physical and psychological shock without
  suffering any permanent damage can be a valuable
  aspect of a woman's life. Since stress in life is
  unavoidable, resilience is a desirable quality to
  cultivate. Psychologists believe that commitment,
  control, and challenge are integral parts of
  resilience. Vogue 1985 (Bradoff, 1985, p. 235)

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Resilience

• The rationale for examining resilience phenomena
  rests on the fundamental assumption that
  understanding how individuals overcome challenges
  to development and recover from trauma will
  reveal processes of adaptation that can guide
  intervention efforts with others at risk.
  (Masten, 1994, p. 3)

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Resilience Myths

• Although the negative terms of at-risk, and
  vulnerability were exchanged for the more
  positive term "resilience", the meaning was the
  same if you were a special person with special
  characteristics of "resilience" then you would
  make it despite adversity.
• Horatio Alger, exceptional person

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Why Oral History?

• when paradigms change, there are usually
  significant shifts in the criteria determining
  the legitimacy both of problems and of proposed
  solutions. Kuhn, 1970 Among the most
  pressing items on the agenda for research on
  adult development is the need to delineate in
  womens own terms the experience of their adult
  life. Gilligan, 1982

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Why Oral History?

• The practice oral history counters the elite
  assumption of the unreflected silence of ordinary
  people and makes their self-representing
  expressions authoritative. Where traditional
  history plays a role in social legitimation, the
  life history movement works to disperse
  authority. Life history research offers as a
  model of social relations in education not system
  reproduction and resistance, but hermeneutic
  conversation. As research, it refuses to separate
  research and practice. It aims to amplify the
  capacity for intentional and historical memory
  (Wexler, 1992, p.95).

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Psychic disequilibrium!

• When those who have power to name and to socially
  construct reality choose not to see you or hear
  you, whether you are dark-skinned, old, disabled,
  female, speak with a different accent or dialect
  than theirs, when someone with the authority of a
  teacher, say, describes the world and you are not
  in it, there is a moment of psychic
  disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror
  and saw nothing. Adrienne Rich, Invisible in
  the Academe

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Definition of Terms

• Resilience the capacity to overcome, or the
  experience of having overcome adversity in
  defiance of the odds.
• Risk factors determined by research to be
  associated with social/academic/economic failure
  including
• Low Socioeconomic Status
• Large Family Size
• Minority Status
• High School Drop Out
• Teen Age Mother/Father
• Poverty
  
  

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• Successthe product of the interactions between
  the persons various characteristics, the
  characteristics of the environment, and the
  characteristics of the situation in which both
  development and achievement can occur. (Gordon
  and Song, 1994)Low socio-economic status
  reflects several factors including
• Low income
• Low parental educational level
• Low level of occupation
• Few Household Items (peng, 1994)
  
  

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Making It Defining Success

• Access to higher education
• Knowledge of Self in Societal/Historical/Spiritual
  Context
• Making a Difference/Giving Back

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Barriers to Educational Persistence

• a. Negotiation with Dominant Cultural Capital
• Societal/Cultural expectations of
  low-income women
• The Forms
• Clothing as Indicator of Status
• b. The "Terminators"
• "Naming" Race/Class Stereotyping
• Unjust Grading
• Sexual harassment

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Factors in Overcoming Adversity

• Structural support (scholarships, special
  programs)
• Strong Relationships with Family, Friends,
  Spiritual Community
• The "Healers

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What Can We Do?

• Those who are truly interested in creating an
  equitable and just system of higher education
  which embraces a diversity of perspectives and
  strengths, must begin to listen, listen, listen
  to the voices of those who are most affected by
  their practice and decisions. Only in the
  respectful listening over long periods of time,
  listening when there is a conflict with the
  currently held theories, listening when long held
  biases are challenged, listening with complete
  attention and listening with the willingness to
  change as a result of what is heard.

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Grow More Healers

• Faculty and Staff Development that encourages and
  validates connection, relationship, reflection.
• Professionals do their own reflective work
• Acknowledge the extra work involved with our
  high-risk students
• Connect reward system to those who are on the
  front lines.

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• When we speak we are afraid
• our words will not be heard nor welcomed
• but when we are silent
• we are still afraid.
• So it is better to speak
• remembering
• we were never meant
• to survive. -- Audre Lorde