When they graduate I want them to feel, "I went through a real thing, not an approximation of college, but I went through college and that means something!" (Adjunct Instructor) This article explores the complexity of providing an academically rigorous college education to adult students enrolled in a union-supported worker education program affiliated with a large urban public university. The author examines differences in student and faculty perspectives on academic rigor and considers how students' lack of academic preparation intersects with institutional constraints to impact academic standards. She examines the role of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in determining academic expectations and outcomes and explores the complex and, at times, conflicting relationship between care and academic rigor. She highlights the crucial role of institutional constraints in hindering the implementation of rigorous education for academically under-prepared students. The author argues that high academic standards are an issue of educational equity for working class students of color and are integral to the social justice mission of the worker education program.Questions about the academic standards of postsecondary institutions have become prevalent in the media (Arenson, 2006;Finder, 2006;Hickok, 2006). The poor skills and limited knowledge of college graduates are publicly decried, with some critics suggesting that a national overhaul of our system of higher education is in order (Arenson, 2006;Dillon, 2005). Implicit in much of this critique is support for policies that would exclude those students deemed unprepared for college level classes, the implementation of standardized university exit exams, and greater institutional and legislative control over college curricula (Arenson, 2006; New York Times, 2006;Schemo, 2006). This article reveals the nuances behind the public debate over academic standards and exposes the challenges to achieving greater academic rigor for academically underprepared adult students. It provides an in-depth exploration of the complex and varied factors that influence academic rigor in a union-supported worker education program affiliated with a large urban public university. Through a close examination of students' and instructors' perspectives
Despite exponential growth in the field of narrative inquiry, personal narrative writing by research participants remains a seldom used research method. This article explores what it meant to the author, a former writing instructor, and her participants, adult college students, to use personal narrative writing by research participants as part of a larger qualitative study that examined the impact of college on adult worker education students. The author found that writing the personal was one way for adult students to begin to locate and critically interrogate their educational experiences and begin to revise their understandings of their educational journeys. This article explores the potential of personal narrative writing to engage participants in a research paradigm that moves them towards a more structural understanding of their previous educational failures and a heightened sense of their agency.Keywords: educational memoir, personal narrative writing, worker education, adult college students I asked students to bring an educational artifact -an object they' d saved, something they' d written, a photograph, anything that represented or revealed something important about their educational experiences -to the first educational memoir class session. William 1 brought a photo of himself with Amiri Baraka (former Black Panther and New Jersey poet laureate), a reminder of the importance writing played in his college experience. Carmen brought a paper she' d written in her first semester at the Worker Education Program (WEP), aware of the distance she had traveled as a writer since those early drafts were produced. April brought an essay she wrote that was published in the WEP literary 'zine, overwhelmed to have a piece of her own creation published for all to read. Deborah brought the start of her educational memoir, a symbol of her journey, still incomplete, through the worlds of school and learning. I am surprised, and pleased, that so many of the artifacts are pieces of the students' own writing. (Field note, 3/12/04)
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