Understanding the Literacies of Working Class First-Generation College Students

Abstract

This qualitative interview study responds to an existing body of literature on first-generation college students that often focuses on the challenges these students face to the exclusion of their strengths or successes. This project pays special attention to strengths or successes associated with first-gen students’ literacy practices, both speaking and writing. Findings from the study suggest that in fact first-gens do posses many literacy strengths that they have developed both during and before their time in college. Namely, first-gens have developed a set of financial and college-going literacies—specialized speaking and writing practices that help these students to navigate pathways to college. Additionally, these students bring to their college classrooms a repertoire of inclusive speaking praxis that includes such specific features as rhetorical listening, invitational rhetoric, and audience awareness. Finally, where first-gens’ written literacies are concerned, workplace contexts prove to be a major asset, and first-gens’ workplace writing has helped them to develop a capacious, nuanced construct of writing that includes but also moves beyond academic writing alone.

Taken together, these findings suggest a need for more qualitative research with this student population, research that might better represent the material reality of these students’ daily lives and experiences in college. Moreover, these findings suggest administrative and pedagogical interventions that might serve to improve these students’ college experiences by not only recognizing their strengths but also by encouraging students to draw from these strengths in their literacy learning in curricular contexts such as first-year writing.