Making Do: A Study of Practices of College-Ready Students at Minority-Serving Community Colleges

• In Event: Preparing English Language Learners to be College- and Career-Ready: Perspectives and Experiences From the Field

Abstract

This presentation draws on a three-year phenomenological study of four Minority-Serving community colleges to outline the discursive activities that racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse first-year college students engaged in to persist in college and be esteemed by others as successful students.

Informed by activity theory and New Literacy Studies, the study framed college readiness as the acquisition of the right mix of Discourses (James Paul Gee's capital "D" Discourses) and so becoming recognizable as a successful student within a context and explored this construct in a database of interview transcripts, public documents, and participant observations gathered at Chief Dull Knife College, El Paso Community College, North Seattle Community College, and San Diego City College.

Artifacts in the database together represented diverse viewpoints on why students come to these colleges, what challenges they face, and the activities that they engage in order to succeed—both to persist and also to recognized by others as successful first-year college students. Data analysis proceeded not so much to arrive at the meaning individuals connect to their experience as to gather and interpret representations of the ways in which individuals and groups take up available social resources to do what they need to do to get started in college. In this analysis of 80 interview transcripts, over 100 public documents, and one-dozen participant observations, becoming college ready is both alienating and empowering.

Most of the students in the study described taking up social practices that undermined social capital, patterns of informal trust, and the skills and knowledge that they brought to college as well as placing themselves under continual assessment. They also described these same practices as opportunities to take responsibility for their own lives and build new identities that, in turn, enabled them to resolve challenges and take up new opportunities.

The presentation leads to recommendations for the structure of first-year college curriculum and instruction that supports the success of students who must learn the Discourses of college while they participate in those Discourses.

Author

• Todd Carl Lundberg, Cascadia Community College