Today I got back to work on my Honors Thesis, after taking a much needed break during the weekend to Yosemite National Park with my partner (pictured below). Now I get to return to it with a fresh face and also that stringent musk of shame and merciless self-criticism that comes when you come back to a body of writing you’d been working on. It doesn’t look bad, per se, but it certainly needs to be fundamentally different. That’s the nice thing about going on a break though, it offers very useful perspective so that I can come back and look at things and know, “No it should be this way and not that way”.
Today I started working on the header titled Asset-Based Approaches to Student Success. This is mainly dealing with Yosso’s (2005) community cultural wealth and how colleges should be more vigilant and concerned about the intersectionalities of their students. I think it’s kind of hard not to inject my own predisposed beliefs about the white, elite, hegemonic universities of the US, but I’m doing my best. Here’s a very raw blurb:
“Yosso (2005) contextualizes her model of community cultural wealth, which builds off of Bourdieu’s cultural capital, by acknowledging the real effects of present deficit framing in higher education. She observes how deficit-framing, a subjective interpretation of individuals or groups which identifies them by their weaknesses and shortcomings, leads to transactional teaching, where the teacher is expected to possess all the knowledge and the student none; higher education faculty and staff interpret the shortcomings of those populations which fall into the achievement gap as the students’ fault, and that those students who can’t immediately perform presumably enter schools with zero normative cultural knowledge or skills, and that their parents neither value or support their education (Yosso, 2005). This leads to a motivation by educators to erase, devalue, and overwrite the cultural knowledge of these impacted students, in order to “deposit” within them the “correct” knowledge and cultural values. As equity in education researchers I worry that this only abides the hegemonic homogeneity of four-year undergraduate institutions, while allowing students to feel shame and invalidation for the identities that they bring with them to the campus.
What deficit-framing doesn’t acknowledge are the myriad strengths that students susceptible to the achievement gap bring with them and offer potentially to the world; transfer students bring with them so many valuable characteristics, including: aspirational capital, familial capital, social capital, navigational capital, linguistic capital, and resistant capital (Yosso, 2005). Yosso argues that this composite wealth that socially marginalized students accumulate and bring with them to college should be not only preserved but supported and championed by institutions that foster these students, because these values have transformative and broadening implications on those students’ academic and professional careers. In other words, instead of erase, we should embrace and continue research on the intersectionalities of students; this applies considerably to transfers who make up a large proproportion of minority and non-traditional students that access higher education.
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