Technologies of the Successful Student

• In Event: Roundtable Session 78
  In Roundtable Session: Perspectives on Successful College Students

Abstract

This qualitative study of a semester-long course, “New Student Orientation,” inquires into the purposes and practices of courses designed to promote student success. Discourse analysis of the textbook and interviews with students explore the course’s mode of address, its assumptions about who students are and what they need, and students’ reception of this address. Discourse analysis reveals a course whose rationalities address students as needing to “become responsible” by employing technologies of self-help to guide them through their first-year experience. Interviews reveal that students felt the course asked them to be “responsible adults” while “treating them like kids” by simplifying a complex transition into easy “steps.” The study offers an analytic framework for research into institutional programming for student success.

Author

• Susan Talburt, Georgia State University