To Know Me Is to Love Me: How Historically Black College and University Faculty Are Reorienting Student Development in Their First-Year Seminars

• In Event: Humanizing Critical Sociocultural Knowledge: Explorations of How Teachers Conceptualize and Enact Culture Across Contexts

Abstract

Over the last few decades, a growing student retention industry ripe with best practices for retaining students has captured the interest of higher education administrators across the nation. Unfortunately, the “best practices” in student retention are often informed by student development theories that emerged from research conducted primarily on White, middle-class students attending predominantly White universities (Bean & Metzner, 1985; Tierney, 1999). The dominant discourse in student development position non-traditional, non-middle class, non-white, non-normative students as not having the cultural capital needed to acclimate, poor academic development and learning skills, and lacking motivation and grit to persist. The theories ascribe academic retention to deficiencies of character rather than the suffering that comes from structural oppression operating within an anti-black K-12 school system. Brown (2013) asserts that “best practices” are not neutrally or passively responsive to ways of knowing “non-traditional” students and, in essence, reinscribe racial inequities.

This study employs Brown’s (2013) humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge framework (HCSK) because it places identity and culture at the center of curriculum and instruction and asserts that learning emerges within already existing historical, sociocultural, and politically contextualized ways of knowing that inform how we see ourselves as teachers, what we teach, and how we teach. Furthermore, Brown’s (2013) HCSK is particularly useful for explicating how notions of student development situated in first-year seminar curriculum is dys-informed (King,1991) by a dominant sociocultural knowledge (Wynter, 2005) that has positioned—historically and currently—the Black student as troublesome. The dys-informed way of knowing Black students position them as different from, less than, and in need of special attention and intervention. Her work interrogates the subtle dehumanizing student development theories that currently frame the prevailing first-year seminar curriculum.

This research seeks to explore and explicate how HBCU faculty are reorienting student development by drawing from a socio-cultural knowledge that informs how they read and understand their students and their own responsibility as teachers as they make curriculum decisions about how to develop their students. In an attempt to illustrate a deepened, complex, multi-dimensional understanding of how sociocultural knowledge informs the curriculum decisions of first-year seminar faculty, AuthorOne crystalizes (Ellingson, 2011) qualitative data collected from the stories of 10 HBCU first-year seminar instructors that teach a 6 different HBCUs in Texas. Data was gathered from a series of in-depth, semi-structured interviews wherein faculty shared stories about their educational experiences, their students’ educational experiences, and the cultural backgrounds of the students they serve and the communities they come from. Although, the participating first-year faculty came from diverse fields of professional expertise (higher education leadership, curriculum and instruction, social and natural sciences, and humanities) and sociodemographic backgrounds (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, age…) they often drew from a humanizing critical sociocultural knowledge to develop curriculum in improvisational ways that are responsive to and situated in the lived experiences of their HBCU students. This research captures how.

Author

• Gina English Tillis, The University of Memphis