| The term "migrants" has been used to describe students for whom college seemed to be an unknown and perhaps unwelcoming land because of the oppressions associated with class, race, ethnicity, and generational status (Mann, 2001; Tinto, 1982). "Migrants" entering the academy bring with them a combination of assets, pressures, and gaps in opportunity, shaped in part by structural conditions and marginalizing experiences. Understanding these multiplicities and combinations, and examining how institutions address them (or do not), represents a critical aspect of the debate about the twin issues of underserved students' access to and persistence in college. This was the focus of the current study.; The study took place within the context of a small, urban, Catholic liberal arts college, whose mission is to provide a holistic, service-oriented education for an explicitly diverse student body. Methods included interviews with staff, classroom observations, participant observation and interviews with students conducted by student researchers as part of a participatory design. These multiple methods not only yielded understanding of students' experiences, but also revealed insights about the college. Parallels were made between students' struggle for inclusion in the context of college and the college's struggle for inclusion in the context of an increasingly corporatized Higher Education "market," one that values the attraction and retention of upper class students (Aronowitz, 2000; Berger, 2000; Bok, 2003; Kirp, 2003). I explore the following in this dissertation: (1) Gifts students offer to the academy even as they double as scenes of personal academic struggle; (2) Manifestations of class as material reality, psychology, policy, discourse of capital, and corporate consciousness; (3) Teaching and learning characterized by "validation" within "holding environments" and mutual transformation frameworks (Rendon, 1993; Powell Pruitt, 2004). Successful "migrants" are reframed as "transnationals" who both seek and provide transformative learning experiences, and can perhaps model for institutions a mestiza consciousness (Anzaldua, 1987; Delgado Bernal, 2001; Glick-Schiller, Basch, Szanton Blanc, 1995). |
