Working Class Latinos Invisibility in the American Community College -- Part 1
The narrative of most studies that deal with Latino education begin with a common narrative: citing national statistics of growth, discussing economic disparities between Latinos and Anglos, and low rates of college persistence. I choose to begin this discussion without these statistics for multiple reasons, the most important being one of identity, or the question of identity when institutions use terms such as “Hispanic” or “Latino” for their own administrative and budgetary purposes, most often accumulating such data without the explicit consultation with the students themselves.
Secondly, I will discuss in this chapter how -- though most students who are enrolled in the First Year Writing course (FYW) take the course in the nation’s community colleges -- the narrative of the community’s ethos is still detached from the identity of the community, especially as public institutions at all levels are being defunded in a neoliberal economy. This simultaneous ubiquity of the community college while the concomitant distancing of the community negates the common narratives mentioned above because.
Finally, modeling the ethics of ethnography as a methodology, I choose to foreground actual student voices in lieu of statistics to validate their experiences through writing from their position as subject instead of voiceless bodies made invisible by such demographics.
The authors of one of the few textbooks of ethnography in the composition course explain that
ethnography … is a researched study that synthesizes information about the life of a people or group. … [Ethnographers] conduct fieldwork in an attempt to understand the cultures they study. And as they study the culture of others, they learn patterns that connect with their own lives and traditions” (Sunstein and Chiresi-Strater 4).
If we step back and ask what college students are supposed to be doing, even or especially first year students, we want to believe that, as college scholars, each student is attempting to understand her own culture – whether it be the largest culture of science's goal of understanding the world, or local cultures of business and finance – and her own place in that culture. Ethnography, instead of the distant and safe examination of culture solely via the point of view from corporate textbooks, introduces the student-scholar to create new knowledge in the first semester of her college career.
Remember that an ethnographic approach brings the student’s expertise into the classroom, effectively reversing the power dynamics from the beginning. For example, many Latino students already have extensive working experience, and as working class students often find increased responsibilities at home as early as 14 or earlier -- going to the job site, working construction with a parent during school breaks, they may learn personal responsibility faster and in various means more than their non-Latino peers, then resent the hand-holding of high school and early college years.
To silence the student’s experience through the pages of a corporate textbook is a sure way to disengage the student from an appreciation of writing. But the student in this ethnographic inquiry can delve as deeply as she wants into questions of class, gender, and ethnicity. This supports the working student’s expectations of engagement with and in the academy. In effect, then, ethnographic inquiry, with the intent to archive student work initiates the student into a life of primary research, analysis, and publication within the context of composition and rhetoric – invention, drafting, revision with audience in mind.
Next:
Reference
Sunstein, Bonnie Stone, and Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater. Fieldworking: Reading and Writing Research. Macmillan, 2011. Print.
Be strong, and courageous.
Dixi et salvavi animam meam
Google +
Twitter @comstone
Professional Blog
