When I wrote about the cultural aspects of teaching in my Computers and Writing proposal, I was not talking about poverty per se. People can be poor without being part of the culture of poverty. But when I talk about low SES students and their culture, I am talking about those who are part of that culture.

What is the difference?

I grew up poor.

My parents married when my mother was a sophomore in high school and my father was a junior in college. He was also homeless and living in his car.

When I was little my father was a college student and went to school 21 hours a semester and worked 50 hours a week at minimum wage jobs. My mother worked on the weekends when my father was home to take care of the children.

My mother got pregnant with me because the doctor insisted that a girl as young as she was could not get pregnant and refused to give her birth control. But since my three siblings, all born before my mother turned 25, were all born on birth control of various types, it is doubtful that birth control would have helped.

Our family had five people in it and lived in a one bedroom apartment. My brother and I slept on couches in the living room. I was going through the trash in our apartment complex and found a pair of shoes that would fit my father, brand new in a box. He wore them to work for the next few years. I was five or six at the time.

We often did not have enough food to eat to feel full. My mother always said we weren’t poor because we always had something to eat. But I remember many times being hungry. And I remember the rare times when I was full after a meal, usually at my grandmother’s house on the farm. She used to worry because I didn’t eat much meat when she fixed it. Dad never told her it was because I wasn’t used to eating meat; he just said it was okay because I ate some of it.

When I was 12, my father got a significant pay raise and I never remember going hungry after that. My sisters, who were four and eight at the time, do not remember much of the poor years at all.

Despite the fact that I grew up poor, I did not grow up in the culture of poverty.

First of all, education was valued.

My father was a college student when I was born and attended law school after that. While neither of his parents had even completed high school, they had six children five of whom got college degrees because education was worth getting. It would get you off the farm and out of back-breaking labor that came without a guarantee of profit.

While my father’s parents had a third and eighth grade education, my mother’s parents both had college degrees. My grandmother, in fact, earned her master’s at Berkeley in the 30s. While my mother never got her college degree, she did attend several colleges while we moved around the country following my father’s career.

There was value seen in going to college, in making something better of yourself.

My parents did not teach me to read at home, but we always had books in the house and reading was valued. My father would come home from work and take my brother and me to the library. We would leave carrying as many books as our arms would hold. If we finished them all, he would take a break from work to take us to the library again to return them and get more. For several years my brother and I read eight to ten books a day.

In our house, the teacher was always right (even when she was wrong) and our job was to learn as much as we could. My father even stated it that way. “I go to work. You go to school. I do my job. You do yours.”

My parents encouraged us to do well in school, to go to college, to get a degree. One of their mantras when I was growing up was, “Don’t get married until you finish college.” It was assumed that I (that we) would go to college.

Second, the individual was valued over the group.

My extended family valued the individual. My father’s parents told their children to “make something” of themselves. My mother’s parents firmly believed that a person could improve their lot in life.

My mom was the first stay-at-home mother in her family in four generations, maybe more. She was countercultural to her family and chose to (mostly) stay home at a time when women were leaving the homes in droves to find fulfillment in their work. While she made odd choices (to them), the family valued her for her choices.

There are other differences between being poor and having a culture of poverty. But these two serve to illustrate the values and experience that I grew up with.

While I grew up poor, I did not grow up a child of poverty. I had mentors in my parents who had been there before me.

My parents went to college. They expected us to go, too.

My father worked hard to improve his lot in life. By the time they retired, my father was an executive in a multinational corporation. He had overcome his own background to succeed. And he showed us how to do that as well.

This is a departure from my normal topics of discussion on this blog. I hope regular readers will not be turned away by this soul baring information on my family. It was an attempt to discuss my background in relation to the online conference topic.

This is how I am looking at/writing about/thinking of my topic for my Computers and Writing presentation. I am blogging a process here.

Since the topic is one which has been of interest to me for a while, I have multiple articles already noted or written on this blog (identified with a TCE: at the beginning). These are articles which are pertinent to where I am going/want to go with the paper.

Articles which are relevant to my Computers and Writing topic:

College for the Underclass
This is a blog post written by a member of the underclass about how she went to college, what she expected from it, and how she veered significantly off the expected path and became a college professor. It is well worth reading, especially if you have no personal experience with being an early person in your family to go to college.

TCE: Rethinking the Value of a College Degree is a post worth looking at, especially in light of the above article, which emphasizes that low SES and underclass students are coming to college to get better jobs.

TCE: An informal discussion of how computer use can be made accessible, particularly for students who are from a low socioeconomic background.

TCE: Class-Based Value Differences

TCE: Notes on student retention
Student retention is an important concept for all college students, but it is especially important when talking about low socioeconomic status students.

TCE: 7 Specific Strategies for Student Retention in the English Classroom

TCE: Why is Student Retention Important to Teachers?

TCE: Bad News for Community Colleges and the students that attend them.

This is especially important to look at since many low SES students go to community colleges, because they are near home and are less expensive than other colleges.

Study into relationship between physical environment and pupils’ attainment and behavioroffers something to think about.

The report’s chief author, Katy Owen, says she found that urban decay could “easily impact upon pupils and their teachers”. She says: “They may demonstrate poor behaviour in the classroom, have low self-esteem, little appetite for educational attainment and have little cultural or social capital to draw on. Their teachers may become disillusioned and frustrated with their limited ability to teach in a community where crime and incivility is rife.”

TCE: The Ugly Stepsister- Rhetoric

TCE: Good links on low SES status students

TCE: Community Colleges

Are Community Colleges Losing Touch with their Communities?

I am involved with the Computers and Writing Online Conference taking place throughout the web for the last week or so and continuing for another week or so. This is the first post for my blog in Asynchronous Sessions 2.

Clearly I am personally involved in blogging and I am married to a digital native. (No, I didn’t rob the cradle. He learned to program on the Apple IIe. In fact, his mother wrote the first computer program for the IRS on the same computer.) I, however, am a digital immigrant. I have had to learn what my husband and my sons take for granted.

I have been teaching college for years, as a TA, an adjunct, and an instructor. Last spring, I was teaching at a community college where most of the students were first-generation college students. They were either urban or rural poor. (I am not sure how the school lines got drawn, but that’s how they worked out.) That is what catapulted me into the study of how to introduce computers, use computers in the writing classroom, and make sure that my students had some measure of information literacy.

Throughout this week you can follow my journey, through blog posts I wrote, articles I read, notes I took, and a discussion of what and why I was thinking. I would love to know what you think of the various topics outlined on the blog throughout this week. Feel free to leave comments.

If you have personal experience of the topics discussed, I would appreciate hearing your stories in the comments as well.

Ensuring Information Literacy and Sustainable Learning across Socioeconomic Backgrounds

Many of our students are digital natives. Because of this, we search for new contact zones in emergent technology. But if we presuppose that our students are already computer savvy because of their age or texting ability, we are doing some of them a disservice. A Pew survey indicates that twenty-three percent of college age people never use the internet. Most often these students are from a low socioeconomic (SES) background. How can we move beyond short-term interventions and help all our students develop information literacy and sustainable lifelong learning?

One part of the answer is to understand the value patterns that students’ communities have historically championed and invoke those as a means of engaging the students in their own educational development. We need to understand and follow their cultural mores in order to introduce them to academic culture.

Another part of the answer is to create a multimodal composition course which predicates a minimal expertise with technology and engage our students, at all levels, by building towards information literacy for everyone that is on par with the most technology-immersed. While the early levels of expertise will be basic to some of our students, they will be a stretch for others. We can enhance student learning for the former by decompartmentalizing their knowledge and applying it in new configurations, expanding its domains and applications, thus building their framework for sustainable learning. We can enhance student learning for the latter by creating a system for the active construction of knowledge through intense involvement with accessible technologies.

Addressing the difficulties of providing information literacy across socioeconomic backgrounds is a challenge that we can meet in the multimodal composition classroom. Through institutional support and sustained instruction, our students can gain the expertise they need for work, school, and play.