Citation:

Kiefson, Ruth. “The Social Dimension of the Community College Classroom.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Vol. 46, no. 1, September 2018, pp. 56-69.

Summary:

Ruth Kiefson explains throughout her essay how building a positive learning environment and choosing activities that facilitate student metacognition will provide students with the motivation, resources and engagement to drive their own reading comprehension. She identifies the social dimension of the classroom as one of the main drivers of student success and states that this dimension has developed into one of her primary considerations as a teacher.

She begins with a description of the unique dynamics of developing reading comprehension for learners in a community college context, and outlines the psychological, obstacles that many of her students must overcome. Kiefson acknowledges that her students have diverse backgrounds and motivations that have brought them to her classroom. She asserts, however, enough of her students have similar struggles experiences with underfunded public schools, for her to be able to generalize about these obstacles.

She describes a consistent issue with perseverance, where students withdraw after a year or less of college, or disengage from the more difficult academic challenges. She identifies the root of this as their negative experiences throughout high school, where they were treated as criminals, subjected to racist harassment and humiliation, or deemed not capable of academic success. She sees students adopt defensive strategies to maintain their self-worth, including avoiding help, or disengaging, because of the risk of exposing their confusion or difficulties. Often these strategies can compound problems and encourage withdrawal.

Another issue she identifies lies in the support systems of her students. She sees two main opportunities for students to feel guilty about their academic pursuits. These students have often relied on family structures in the past as a resource, and taking personal time to focus on their own studies can feel very selfish. Alternatively, their family members may, because of financial necessity or time constraints or other reasons, be unable to pursue a college education, and the feeling of advancing ahead while others do not can negatively impact student attitudes about their education.

She advocates for inserting relatable portrayals of personal struggle into the curriculum as a way for students to engage with the curriculum and feel socially supported. These texts often resonate emotionally with students and can explain the origin of many of their struggles not as internal deficiencies, or from their communities, but rather as cross generational problems of inequality and racism. Autobiographical works create the potential for meta-cognition and peer to peer support networks to grow, when students see their own struggles mirrored in the past and in each other. Following this section she outlines three activities that work to accomplish these goals of meta-cognitive awareness, reading comprehension, and a supportive class environment.

The first activity has two learning outcomes, one derived from the content of an article, and one from the process of reading the article. The article itself analyzes opposing academic attitudes within Eastern and Western cultures, where the former emphasizes struggle as a sign of emotional endurance, and the latter emphasizes competition, and intelligence as a static, innate trait. Afterwards students assess these attitudes on the basis of how effectively they promote a positive learning environment. This assessment lets students draw from their own learning experience to evaluate these attitudes, and open their notions of intellectual growth.  The other learning outcome is promoted by the manner in which she and students read the article. She first models a “Think Aloud” (61), where she reads the article out loud and injects her period thoughts and evaluations as they arise. After a little while she asks students to do the same. This process helps students create an internal dialogue and actively strategize about their reading process.

The second activity involves watching a video where other students describe their personal struggles with reading, their insecurities about their intelligence, or moments of feeling stupid. She asks her own students to create two separate lists, one where they describe just what they are witnessing, and one with their response to it. Then students share in small groups and next out to the whole class. Following this activity she asks students to describe their own relationship with reading, including both positive and negative aspects of this relationship. Then she reads aloud segments of their letters anonymously, identifying threads between them. This works to create a sense of community within the classroom and demonstrates shared struggles and successes.

The final activity is more oriented towards reading comprehension and evaluation. She has students read a short section that includes a Chinese proverb, and then follows this with multiple choice questions to evaluate their comprehension. After she asks students to list the reading strategies they used to find the correct answers. She helps students identify what may have happened for them to choose answers that display they didn’t quite comprehend the article. Often this has to do with a lack of familiarity, with the genre or vocabulary, rather than some problem with capacity. This realization can help empower students rather than convincing them to opt out. Also, this process is often the first time students have actively monitored their own comprehension of a text, and can work to habituate them into this process.

These activities ideally work to create a positive learning environment before the class has progressed beyond the first weeks. She closes by admitting that there is a line to walk between being supportive and allowing students to get away with less, but ultimately points out that students who aren’t comfortable in their social environment aren’t able to think.

Quotes:

“Improving teaching practice, particularly by utilizing the social dimension of the classroom, requires a recognition of who our students are and where they fall in the hierarchy of society. Once we see them clearly we can hone our curriculum and teaching practice to help them negotiate their challenges.” (57)

“As learners fighting an uphill battle with little support, they have been conditioned to adopt various psychological strategies for protecting their self-worth that cut against the fulfillment derived from engaged learning” (58).

“Once we, as educators, recognize the profound challenges that working-class students face trying to negotiate higher education in an unequal society, we also should shape the curriculum to help them understand these challenges” (59).

“Too often we ask students to do original thinking about a subject they know little about, but as they consider the point in “Struggle for Smarts?,” they already have a well-developed schema to which they can relate” (61).

“The class discussion allows students to see that others share many of their fears, hopes, sensitivities, lack of confidence, and anxieties about tackling college reading assignments” (63).

“If they realize they are missing meaning, they may revisit the text to construct the meaning again. However, if they aren’t monitoring their comprehension, they won’t even be aware of their failure to comprehend” (65).

“By utilizing texts like these that depend so much on social interaction, I can address some of my students’ underlying fears and insecurities during the first few weeks of class.” (66)

Reflection:

The title of this article was the main initial pull for me. When I consider my career following this program, teaching at a community college feels like a viable option. Also, I have been thinking more recently about the social dynamics in my classroom, as my students are becoming more social with each other, these dynamics grow more complex, and my responses to them more deliberate. I was pleased to find the strong emphasis on developing a positive learning environment in this article, and an exhortation to build in student centered curriculum changes.

I also was excited to read so many strategies for addressing issues with reading comprehension, and am now curious about how realistic it would be to build this into the curriculum next quarter.  Many of my students related struggles with reading in their letter to me, and while I feel that their writing practice will likely help them read more effectively, it’s not really explicitly built into our curriculum at all. While I think my students are less heterogeneous in background than the students Kiefson describes, they have a wide array of experience and struggles. Not all of my students count English as their first language, not all of them come from wealthy families, and I’m sure all of them have at least some level of insecurity about their own perception of their intelligence. I would like to try to access their personal experience more, as I promised them we would, and as they take ownership over the social dynamics of the classroom, ensure that it continues on a supportive trajectory. I am unsure, however, how to structure in these moments of self-reflection so as to effectively facilitate meta-cognition, and am wary of being perceived as simply trying to “relate to the youth” or something along those lines.

One preliminary idea comes to mind for a pedagogical research study that could pertain to this reading. Next quarter I could follow assign homework that follows the letter to the instructor format, but augment it with a likert style survey that evaluates the students’ own perception of their reading abilities. For example ‘I easily comprehend academic texts’ or ‘I struggle to read works that span different disciplines’. Then, throughout the quarter, I could insert activities that mirror Kiefson’s with their structure and their goals of meta-cognition and community building. At the end of the quarter I could supply the same (or a slightly altered) likert style assessment, and evaluate for changes. There’s a lot of opportunity in this sort of test for control and assessment of different variables. For example, I could also have students evaluate their writing abilities with a preliminary and final assessment, while still only increasing the amount of activities oriented towards reading comprehension. This could suggest at the relationship between reading and writing abilities. After a few quarters, I could remove the aspects of activities that attempt to form a positive social dynamic (I feel conflicted about this as it could necessarily have a negative impact on student experience for the sake the test) to see how peer to peer support benefits student learning outcomes. Alternatively, I could just boost the amount of social support I facilitate in the classroom to see if there is a change in the test results (perhaps to evaluate if there are diminishing returns on this sort of facilitation). Finally, I’m also curious if there is anything I could do to gather data from this quarter. This quarter can act as a benchmark against which to evaluate the quarters that do have these sorts of activities and intentions threaded into them.

Kiefson’s article was a rich springboard for these sorts of research ideas and practical applications. I am glad I stumbled on an article that was so directly referenced her day to day classroom environment and pulled me down from larger conceptual frameworks.