Higher Education and First-Generation Students : Cultivating Community, Voice, and Place for the New Majority

Higher Education and First-Generation Students offers readers a rich understanding of the experience of students who are first in their family to attend college. This book contends that first-generation students are isolated and marginalized on many large college campuses and considers learning communities and critical multicultural pedagogies as vehicles to cultivate community, voice, and place for this new majority of students. This book is a theoretically informed study of the lived experience of FG students and draws on their voices to demonstrate how their insights interface with what we, as educators, think we know about them. What can we learn from these students? How might their insights inform and shape the learning spaces we create for them? Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 14 Part I: Getting There: First-Generation Students and the Road to College......Page 24 1 A Long Way from Home: Deepening Our Understanding of First-Generation Students......Page 26 2 Strangers without Codebooks: Isolation and Marginalization......Page 42 Part II: Being Here: Surviving the Transition to College......Page 58 3 Reimagining the University: Theoretical Approaches to Serving First-Generation College Students......Page 60 4 Toward Community, Connectedness, and Care......Page 86 Part III: Getting Through: Lessons from First-Generation Students......Page 106 5 Rationale and Design for the Multicultural Learning Community......Page 108 6 Belonging and Finding Place......Page 132 7 Claiming Self: Identity and Academic Voice......Page 152 8 On Critiques and Possibilities......Page 180 References......Page 200 Index......Page 220 A long way from home: deeping our understanding of first-generation students Strangers without codebooks: isolation and marginalization Re-imagining with university: theoretical approaches to serving first-generation college students Toward community, connectedness, and care Rationale and design for the multicultural learning community Belonging and finding place Claiming self: identity and academic voice On critiques and possibilities.