Strangers at the Table: Student Veterans, Writing Pedagogy, and Hospitality in the College Composition Classroom.

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of Post-9/11 student veterans’ academic experiences in the college composition classroom. I interviewed twenty-four student veteran informants enrolled at one four-year institution about their experiences as college writers, using hospitality as a conceptual framework to interpret their narratives. Hospitality is an orientation of openness to others and the practice of hosts receiving and welcoming guests. Viewing the classroom as a space where diverse individuals temporarily gather together, I outline the possibilities and limitations of hospitality as a guiding pedagogical framework in the composition classroom. Based on informant narratives, I theorize teachers as "hosts," students as "guests," and teachers and students as "strangers" who can mutually influence one another. I offer a model of the college composition classroom as a hospitable space, alternative to other models such as a "community of peers" or a "contact zone," arguing that hospitality draws necessary attention to axes of difference operating among classroom participants and to the temporary nature of any specific class. Study findings reveal that student veteran informants develop a strong professional ethos in the military, which they bring with them into the classroom. “Professionalism” serves as a category that participants use to mark their difference from other students and as a framework for orienting themselves to their schooling. Student veteran informants are focused on their future professional goals, and some struggle to find a connection between those goals and the curriculum in their college composition courses. I argue that dialogue between teachers and students about their respective teaching and learning goals and an explicit focus on transfer of learning in the composition curriculum can help students to invest in and learn more from their college composition courses. Study findings also show that informants do not view themselves as "peers" with other students, suggesting the need to revise current theorizations of collaborative learning and activities, such as peer review, for all students, not just student veterans. I contend that conceptualizing students as "strangers" to one another, rather than "peers," highlights how central the recognition and negotiation of difference is to a truly collaborative and hospitable classroom.