Classroom, Campus, Community: Lower-Class Agency in Higher Education
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Date
2023-03-24
Authors
Kratwell, Paul
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Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
Lower-class language, logics, and ways of being have been excluded from higher education, especially at selective universities. Fewer people from the lower classes enroll, and those who manage to matriculate do so as outsiders. To counter social reproduction perpetuated by educational inequality, this dissertation creates a program to restore agency to lower-class students in selective universities, broaden the social imaginary to normalize lower-class culture and expression, and carry these paradigm-changing attitudes to the public. I describe a study I conducted on student personal narrative in First-Year Composition in which students demonstrate the importance of self-positioning in academia. An awareness of personal agency improves personal success and heightens civil discourse. First-Year Composition, as a required class with a diverse set of students, has the potential to serve as a vehicle for influencing the academic social imaginary that relegates lower-class discourse to the outside. By incorporating personal student narratives into curricula and discussions, students and instructors recognize the rhetoricity of each other’s stories. The senses of agency students develop from telling their stories helps them to position themselves in academia. It also allows them to understand how different agents interact, our subjectivities constantly shaping one another. The classroom becomes a place of shared inquiry where argument resembles cooperative dissensus more than competitive point-counterpoint. This ability to consider personal goods along with the goods of others in complex situations could be characterized as “practical wisdom.” In such a dehierarchized space, lower-class students gain a voice while all students, regardless of social class, gain a deeper understanding of civil discourse. And this inclusive approach to civil discourse changes the relationship between the institution and the public. Through equal partnership and genuine listening, campus and community identify mutual problems in a shared ecology. Cooperative attitudes and actions erode the social boundaries between the lower classes and education. A spirit of shared inquiry challenges assumptions that lower-class students and community members need to abandon their language, values, and personalities to experience success. Meaningful action that begins in the composition classroom exposes socioeconomic limit-situations and increases possibility for more fairly educating the public.
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Keywords
community literacy, composition, higher education, poverty, student agency, working class