Blog #5: Discourse Communities and the "Cost of Affiliation"

Steve Jobs didn't finish college. Neither did Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg or John Glenn or Robert Frost. These fabulously successful individuals didn't need it. And yet, statistically, most successful people have complete college. Of course a college degree has no guarantees, but in the last recession, people with college degrees didn't suffer nearly as much as people without them. And most people agree that education plays a significant role in moving up the success ladder--even if what the end up doing has nothing to do with their college degree. (There are many ways to define success, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm saying enough money to live comfortably and meaningful work.)

The thing is, the people at who most need to move up the success ladder often don't finish college. That has led a lot of scholars to ask why and to create initiatives to improve graduation rates for at-risk students, those kids from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, kids who are the first in their families to go to college. 

I didn't come from a rich background, but my family just assumed that I would go to college. High school graduation was no big deal in my house; it was what you had to do to get to college. And I wasn't done with school until I had a bachelor's degree. That kind of mindset keeps kids like me in school even when they encounter challenges that might keep them from finishing. College is just what you do.

Every day I encounter students who don't have that kind of background; their parents don't understand what they need to do to finish, so they pressure them to attend multiple family gatherings that keep them from studying or to work more hours. Without family support, either financial or emotional, they falter, and many of them just give up, believing college isn't for them.

In "Why Poor Students Struggle," published in the New York Times, New York city high school teacher and educational coach Vicki Madden reviews completion rate statistics and suggests that the biggest challenge to finishing school may be that "students have to come to terms with the unspoken transaction: exchanging your old world for a new world, one that doesn't seem to value where you came from."

This article reminded me of SDSU professor Ann Johns' discussion in "Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice." She argues that when students become "active participants" in a discourse community, they often must make sacrifices that "can create personal and social distance between them and their families and communities" (511). To fit into a new discourse community, they have to take on the "values, language, and genres" of that community. This claim is similar to Devitt's claim that when writers take up a genre, they also take up the ideologies, values, and norms of that genre (339).

So--in this week's blog post, you can discuss the ideas Johns and Madden toss out, or you can consider Amy Tan's illustration of how she moves back and forth between the language of her mother and the language of her profession. Or, you can take a minutes to consider your process of immersion in an academic discourse community or your adjustment to university life or how you navigate between the way you need to be in your family and the way you need to be while you are here at SDSU.