Staying the Course: Persistence and Opportunities to Learn Sociology in a Community College Classroom.

Abstract

Research on persistence in community colleges has used theory that focuses on the experience of students at 4-year residential institutions. The most widely used model of college student persistence (Tinto, 1975, 1993, 2012) allots equivalent attention to academic and to social integration. Yet conditions at commuter colleges in general suggest that students’ academic experiences might be of greater significance than social ones. Also, within Higher Education, college student persistence and college level teaching and learning are traditionally separate streams of research; yet it’s reasonable to assume that student experiences with teaching or learning could impact their persistence. This dissertation represents an exploratory, semester-long, participant observation based research of teaching introductory sociology at a New England community college that seeks to bridge the gap between these two interrelated areas of theory. Three different instructors were observed teaching the same course for this multi-case study. In addition to participant observation, case data was based on perceptions of the teaching obtained from instructor and student interviews. The research documents how instructors’ surface approach (Saljo, 1979, Marton and Booth, 1997) to reading their textbooks was manifest in their lectures. It demonstrates how sociology, if articulated strictly in the vernacular, entails systematic errors in lecture. We can infer from the data that such errors have experiential implications for students and for their academic integration. Hence, I suggest adding a concept of intellectual (or disciplinary) engagement to Tinto’s model. This concept refers to the experience of being introduced to a new discipline, and mediates between student interactions and their academic integration in the original model. Pedagogically relevant dimensions of similarity and difference emerged in the instructor’s perceptions of teaching (Chapter 4), their actual teaching on the first day (Chapter 5) and in their teaching over the course of the semester (Chapter 6). Lecture content from the two instructors who adopted surface approaches, compared to the original textbook content, unveiled similar contradictions of the textbook (Chapter 7). In both cases the textbook was marginal to the student’s course experience, yet both instructors appeared committed to ensuring that it had a palpable presence in their classroom.