Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future

“…56. Pageen Richert Powell (2013) makes this very argument from the literature on retention, first arguing that most first-year writing students will not need to learn academic discourse (half leave the university and most of the other half take careers outside academia), then offering a "kairotic pedagogy" that teaches students writing they can use now in their lives (p. 118).…”

Enhancing Alliances and Joining Initiatives to Help Students: The Story of How We Created Developmental Learning Communities at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi

“…As noted, composition scholars are often not as present in retention efforts as they might be-and their expertise is not necessarily recognized by on-campus administrators. Our field's focus has largely followed Pegeen Reichert Powell's (2014) conclusion in exploring the role of first-year writing in retention: "while there may be very little we can do to prevent our students from leaving, we have a lot more control over what we do when they're sitting in front of us in our classrooms" (28). The challenge, though, is that when we focus solely on the classroom level, we miss larger changes that can lend themselves to institutional retention efforts without compromising our values as writing faculty.…”

“…A search through the Writing Program Administrator's listserv (WPA-L) archives shows retention to be an ongoing interest of the composition community, a community who tends to teach small classes and has the opportunity to get to know the students who disappear. However, with the exception of work by Beth Brunk-Chavez and Elaine Fredericksen (Brunk-Chavez and Fredericksen 2008), Pegeen Reichert Powell (2009Powell ( , 2014, and Todd Ruecker (2015), and some scholarship in basic writing (e.g., Baker and Jolly 1999;Glau 2007;Hagedorn 2012;McCurrie 2009;Peele 2010;Seidman 2012;Webb-Sunderhaus 2010), there has been very little published work that explores the ways writing program instructors and administrators can be involved in discussions of student retention and success and affect change not only at the programmatic level but also at the institutional and state levels.…”

Building Intercultural Teachers: Designing Information Literacy Instruction Opportunities for Increasingly International Populations

“…This support has been made manifest through a variety of initiatives, of which information literacy teaching forms one of the most common (see Peters, 2010). The desire to help newcomers settle in and succeed in their new setting is, as Powell (2014) points out with reference to retention narratives, an idea against which it is hard to argue. However, research illustrates that an uncritical acceptance of the ways in which librarians attempt to assist international populations may serve to complicate rather than to facilitate engagement within culturally unfamiliar information environments (Conteh-Morgan, 2003;Hicks, 2016, Hicks & Lloyd, 2016.…”