Retention and Resistance

Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

Pegeen Reichert Powell

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780874219302
• eBook ISBN:
  9780874219319
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Retention and Resistance combines personal student narratives with a critical analysis of the current approach to retention in colleges and universities, and explores how retention can inform a revision of goals for first-year writing teachers.

Retention is a vital issue for institutions, but as these students' stories show, leaving college is often the result of complex and idiosyncratic individual situations that make institutional efforts difficult and ultimately ineffective. An adjustment of institutional and pedagogical objectives is needed to refocus on educating as many students as possible, including those who might leave before graduation.

Much of the pedagogy, curricula, and methodologies of composition studies assume students are preparing for further academic study. Retention and Resistance argues for a new kairotic pedagogy that moves toward an emphasis on the present classroom experience and takes students' varied experiences into account. Infusing the discourse of retention with three individual student voices, Powell explores the obligation of faculty to participate in designing an institution that educates all students, no matter where they are in their educational journey or how far that journey will go.

1 A Story of Retention Research

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Helen is one of the toughest students I’ve ever taught. By this I mean that, at times, her demeanor is tough. Her language is tough. And she would admit parts of her background are pretty tough, too. I also mean she is probably one of the brightest, most earnest, most hardworking students I have ever met, and it was tough to teach her when I knew she was struggling with money and family and relationships and her vision for the future and her own sense of herself. She approached the writing and the reading with an enthusiasm that made our classroom time together a joy, but I also spent many hours outside the classroom dealing with her extracurricular challenges, exhausting the resources and services at my college, and trying to come to terms with my limits as an educator.

Put simply, research on student retention tries to determine why a student like Helen might leave college after one semester, why others stay, and whether or not there is anything we can do to influence these decisions; the goal of such research is to figure out ways to keep as many students as possible enrolled in a particular institution. But the issue of retention is hardly simple, and it raises some particularly compelling questions about our own roles as educators. Helen was a tough student to teach because I didn’t face a day during the semester she was enrolled in my class without confronting these questions: Is higher education a right or a privilege? What is the purpose of higher education? What does “success” in college mean? And what role does writing instruction play in answers to these questions?

This chapter tells Helen’s story. I got to know Helen both as a participant in the Student Faculty Partnership for Success program (which I describe in the introduction) and as a student in my Writing and Rhetoric course. Like the other students I discuss in this book, she also sat down for a long recorded and transcribed interview while she was still enrolled in my college. (I return to Helen’s story in chapter 4, and in that chapter, I draw on a second interview, conducted two and a half years later.)¹

On one hand, the peculiarities of Helen’s experiences, behaviors, and personality traits undermine much of what we think we know about retention—who leaves and how to prevent that from happening—and thus her story lays the groundwork for a critique of the discourse of retention, which I continue in chapter 2. On the other hand, the picture that emerges of a bright and engaged student who drops out of college after one semester compels me to ask important questions about my goals as a writing instructor and my responsibilities to teach students like Helen who may never graduate, at least not from the college where I taught them, questions I take up in chapters 3 and 4.

Helen in many ways represents the larger population of students who are at risk for leaving college before graduation, who may or may not transfer to other institutions or return later to achieve the degree. We hear in her story many of the “risk factors” the data tell us to look for when trying to determine who might leave. She is representative, too, because, paradoxically, her story is unique—I believe it is nearly impossible to extrapolate from this one case any useful generalizations about retention. I am inclined to argue that all students are unique in this way. Getting to know her, like getting to know the other students I write about in this book, has taught me just how much we don’t know, and how much we may never be able to know, about the reasons some students leave and other students stay.²

In this chapter, I put Helen’s story next to a discussion of some of the dominant strains of retention scholarship. I begin with a brief history of retention research to provide some necessary context. Then, I juxtapose Helen’s narrative with highlights from recent retention research in order to illustrate the difficulties of going back and forth between students’ voices and research, the struggle to reconcile both of these discourses into one tidy narrative, and the disjointedness of our understanding of retention.

A Brief History of Retention Research

The issue of retention occupies a growing body of research: Vincent Tinto asserts that “student retention is one of the most widely studied areas in higher education” (Tinto 2006–2007, 1). While the motivations for studying and trying to improve retention are varied, the assumption in this body of scholarship, and even among other academics who do not study retention, is almost always that retention is good. Some retention scholars focus on the benefits to individual students who remain in school until they achieve a college degree: “A bachelor’s degree is no longer considered a potential stepping stone to a better life. It is the gatekeeper to myriad social and individual benefits, ranging from income, employment stability, and occupational prestige to engagement in civic and political activities” (Cabrera, Burkum, and LaNasa 2005, 155). Other retention scholars stress the benefits to society, both politically and economically, of educating as many people as possible: “An educated citizenry will keep the United States strong and vibrant. This, in essence, is what makes us a great nation and an example for others to follow” (Seidman 2005b, 315).

Still others focus on the benefits to the institutions themselves. It is perhaps this motivation, more than the others, that fuels administrations’ support for retention scholarship and programs. Tinto explains this rationale in very clear terms:

Today it is more important than ever for institutions to respond to the challenge of increasing student success. Forced to cope with tight, if not shrinking, budgets, institutions face mounting pressure to improve their rates of student retention and graduation. In many cases, this pressure reflects the movement of states to include graduation rates in a system of institutional accountability. In other cases, this pressure reflects the impact of widely publicized ranking systems that include graduation rates as one measure of “quality.” In still other cases, this pressure mirrors the reality that increased student retention is critical to the stability of institutional budgets. (Tinto 2005b, ix–x; cf. Hossler 2006)

It is difficult to distinguish the various motivations for studying retention inasmuch as focusing on the benefits to individuals and society speaks to the whole purpose of higher education, and focusing on the financial implications of the retention problem speaks to institutions’ ability to fulfill that purpose. Nevertheless, the extent to which retention efforts are funded by individual colleges and universities and supported by upper-level administrators is often dependent on the extent to which such efforts will realize financial gains in the form of tuition dollars, state funding, or future graduates’ support as alumni.

According to Joseph B. Berger and Susan C. Lyon, retention, as an area of concern in higher education, did not exist in any significant way until the beginning of the twentieth century, and only in the last three or four decades has an identifiable body of scholarship emerged (Berger and Lyon 2005, 9). The tremendous expansion of higher education in the 1950s due in part to the GI Bill, as well as increased access to higher education made possible through other movements like civil rights and feminism, diversified the student population in ways most institutions were not prepared for. As Berger and Lyon explain,

Attempts to promote access and diversity on college campuses led to many challenges, some of which were directly associated with the retention of students. Many campuses were unprepared to deal with a more diverse student body, and many were unable or unwilling to create supportive environments for students of color. Additionally, many students from underrepresented minority groups that were now allowed greater access to higher education had not been provided adequate educational preparation, given the inequities in school systems throughout America. As a result, retention rates were quite low for minority students. (Berger and Lyon 2005, 16)

Thus, much like the history of the field of composition studies, especially the development of process approaches and the subfield of basic writing, research on retention in the 1970s arose, in part, as a response to the struggles of institutions to respond to the needs of these new students. There was also a fear among college administrators that enrollment numbers would begin to flatten in the late 70s, and in anticipation of this decline, seminal work on retention by William Spady and Vincent Tinto was published then (Berger and Lyon 2005, 16–19).

In the 1980s, the trend in retention research and practice moved toward “enrollment management,” informed by the Total Quality Management movement of the same era: admissions, student services, recruitment, financial aid, and institutional research were consolidated around the effort to bring students in and keep them there (Berger and Lyon 2005, 21). Efforts like these initiated the student-as-consumer model that dominates higher education today, a phenomenon I return to in chapter 2. The current financial climate in higher education is prompting even more interest in the reasons students leave. Since the 1990s, retention has emerged as one of the most researched areas in higher education today (6). Dissertations about retention in higher education have increased 35 percent from the period of 1988–1998 to the period of 1999–2009.³ Likewise, the quarterly, peer-reviewed Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory & Practice began publication in 1999. What’s more, this is an area of scholarship that has yielded retention “experts,” consultants who promise to provide programs and initiatives that will improve an institution’s retention rate. One study found that a sample of forty American colleges spent, on average, close to $10,000 on conferences, webcasts, research reports, and other information sources and a mean of approximately $25,000 on consulting services to improve student retention in one year (Survey of Student Retention Policies in Higher Education 2008, 18–19). These figures do not include all the money put into the actual programs or positions created specifically to address retention. In other words, retention is a growth industry. Tinto admits that “it would not be an understatement to say that student retention has become big business for researchers, educators, and entrepreneurs alike” (Tinto 2006–2007, 2). And like any good industry, the entrepreneurs create the need for their services. There have always been students who drop out, or transfer to other schools, and there have been economic crises before, too. What’s different now is that there is a battalion of consultants and a plethora of products and services ready to address what we now see as a problem, and a buzzword, a body of scholarship, and conversations in popular media and on local campuses—a complex, multilayered discourse—to keep the problem front and center.

And this is part of my point here: in large part due to the emergence of the field of retention scholarship, we see a student like Helen as a problem to be solved. Her story reminds us that positioning students within the framework of “problem: solution” is inadequate, unproductive, and possibly unethical.

Retention and Previous Academic Experiences: I was really screwing myself hard as hell.

Helen’s story is punctuated by her many moves. During high school, she lived in the city, then moved out to a suburb with her mom, where, in her words, I got Saturday detentions almost every weekend. Didn’t go . . . I wasn’t going to classes. I was ditching a lot of the morning classes, always late. She got involved with gangs, then moved out to her dad’s home to avoid the gang members after her close friend (and gang brother) was killed and they were coming after her. About that school, she said, They threw me into geometry. And geometry I slept through every day. I told the [teacher] I’m not going to be able to learn this. And I slept through it every day. Chemistry was the same thing, slept through that. So, like, I was really screwing myself hard as hell, hard as hell. I wasn’t passing any classes.

She then moved back to her mom’s because she found out she wouldn’t graduate on time from the school she attended at her dad’s. When asked if she had been held back a year in school because of all the turbulence, she replied, In answer to your question if I was held back, technical I was held back because when I went to H-F as a junior, they did label me as a sophomore, so I guess that is being held back. But they told me I’d be able to make up the credits. But they’re telling me in order to graduate, I would have to do so much schoolwork, Prairie State College to do night courses, do this, and then get my diploma mailed to me. I told them, kiss my ass. Either I’m going to graduate on time, or instead of doing all this stuff, I’ll get my GED because it will be a lot quicker than doing all the extra shit. Rather than go to that trouble, she reenrolled in her original high school and, in her words, I killed my senior year. Killed it. Came out with As and Bs. Killed it. Graduated on time.

According to Jennifer L. Crissman Ishler and M. Lee Upcraft’s review of retention literature, “There is substantial evidence that the most powerful predictor of persistence into the sophomore year is the first-year student’s prior academic achievement, including high school grades” (Ishler and Upcraft 2005, 33; see also Astin and Oseguera 2005, 256; C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Story of Retention Research
• 2 The Seduction and Betrayal of the Discourse of Retention
• 3 The Possibility of Failure
• 4 Beyond Retention
• References
• About the Author
• Index