Remediating Academic Support: An Ethnographic Reading of a Postsecondary Learning Center

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Developmental Education and Academic Skill Building

Abstract

While overt and systematic forms of remediation proliferate at community colleges through developmental education courses, remediation also works across the system of U.S. higher education to satisfy divergent goals of universal access and highly guarded academic prestige. Recognizing that remediation often targets students whose “at-riskness” has been implicitly tied to their racial identities, socioeconomic status, language backgrounds, and/or parental education levels, this practitioner research study created opportunities for students to collectively construct and articulate their epistemological perspectives, learning goals, and cultural and linguistic resources. This ‘re-mediation’ of academic support offers an alternative to the therapeutic, ‘fix-it’ model of most postsecondary learning centers, thereby challenging current learning support practices and the institutional structures that operate to define and restrict them.

Author

• Ryan Miller, University of Pennsylvania