Abstract
In 2015 I reviewed Kevin Kumashiro’s Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning toward Social Justice for Power and Education, discussing issues concerning equality and diversity in classrooms, the central question being: how might one teach against oppression? This collection, edited by Elizabeth M Lee and Chaise LaDousa, continues the conversation, exploring experiences of power and marginality in higher education (HE) institutions across the United States from the perspective of undergraduate students. Based on empirical qualitative research, each chapter focuses on the everyday experiences of different student groups on campus and ‘the micro-interactional bases of inequality’ (2). The themes discussed here are timely. As increasing onus is being put on HE institutions to become more diverse in terms of their student populations, there is also recognition that educational credentials do not necessarily lead to upward socio-economic mobility for those who come to HE under the broad banner of diversity. As social capital is now just as important for graduates as their academic credentials, more attention is being paid to student engagement, with students being expected to engage actively with the extracurricular aspect to college life through, for instance, volunteering and society membership. However, does everyone benefit from this, more informal, side of college life equally? How are such opportunities on campus stratified according to differences based on race, gender, social class and/or sexuality? How might those same differences reflect broader social structures and social hierarchies? These are just some of the questions tackled throughout the ten chapters, divided across two parts: ‘Identities in practice’ and ‘Institutional interactions around power and marginality’.
One of the book’s strengths is that it avoids positioning ‘power’ and ‘marginality’ in opposition. Rather, the two concepts are placed on a continuum and shift depending on where students are, physically, on campus, from the classroom to the university canteen. This emphasis on the spatial is an important one in that it highlights not only the socio-emotional aspect to learning, but also how students’ experience is ‘collective and external rather than individual and interior’ (Boler and Zembylas, 2016: 20). Part I, ‘Identities in practice’, problematises the conflation of identity into fixed, essentialist categories (see Somers, 1994) by looking at the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality in the formation of learner identities. By examining the multiple positionalities that students bring with them, this section illustrates how identity categories are fractured, yet formative, for the students in question. In Chapter 1, for example, Truong et al. discuss the intersections of race with social class, using autoethnography to tease out the tensions in being both an ‘Asian-American’ and ‘low-income’ student in a wealthy research-intensive college. In Chapter 2, Nenga et al. examine the very different experiences of students grouped together as ‘Hispanic’, illustrating the different communities on campus and how membership in such communities can help and/or hinder social integration. Eisen, in Chapter 3, looks at the racialisation of students as ‘Hawaiian’ and the use of counterspaces on campus as students seek either to affirm their identity or to escape micro-aggressions from others. The final chapter in this section, by McCabe, looks at friendships based on both racial solidarity and racial diversity. Together, these authors show that ‘modes of marginalisation or power are dynamic, in flux, and always unfolding’ (5), in ways that do not fit easily into policy categories.
Part II, ‘Institutional interactions around power and marginality’, highlights structural inequalities between and within HE institutions. This section will appeal to readers who are interested in Pierre Bourdieu, as three of the five chapters draw critically on his work, in their discussions. In Chapter 5, Jack questions ‘treating lower-income undergraduates as a monolithic group’ (84), contrasting the divergent experiences and trajectories of those who participated in a scholarship or ‘enrichment’ programme with those who participated in one of the aptly named ‘extraction programmes’ removing students from their typically underfunded public schools and placing them in a resource-rich private high school. This latter group accumulate cultural capital as they progress through their high school studies, which eases their transition to university. The argument here is twofold, with Jack critiquing the overly deterministic relationship between class origin and subsequent behaviour, but, in a separate article on this topic, maintaining that elite colleges effectively ‘hedge their bets’ with regard to diversity, ‘recruiting those already familiar with the social and cultural norms that pervade their own campuses’ (Jack, 2015). The following chapter, by Hurst and Warnock, was, for me, the most intriguing in its discussion of Bourdieu’s les miraculés or ‘working-class students’, who ‘make it against the odds’ in elite educational institutions. It emphasises the power of storytelling in identity construction, contrasting the experiences of a group of working-class students between those who wish to assimilate to their new middle-class surroundings by drawing on dominant narratives of meritocracy and gratitude – and receiving institutional support for doing so – and those who hold on to strong working-class identifications and tell quite a different story about social class, poverty and inequality on campus. The remaining chapters explore institutional issues around race and fraternity life, masculinity and student residence halls, and the development of lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or queer identities in college.
This edited collection will be of interest to anyone curious as to the construction of learner identities in educational institutions and the relational aspect of learning. It highlights the complexity of students’ experience, illustrating how academic considerations, while important, are not the only factor affecting retention rates in HE institutions. It emphasises that how students feel about their institutions and their place within them also wields considerable influence on how they perform academically. Just how education policy can accommodate such a rich tapestry of experience and identities is unclear, particularly in relation to differences within groups. Nonetheless, in drawing attention to the experiential aspects of campus life, this volume offers a new way for policymakers, teaching staff and administrators to think about inclusion.