Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave

1. A Story of Retention Research

DOI: 10.7330/9780874219319.c001 1 A S to ry o f R e t e n t i o n R e s e a r c h Helen is one of the toughest students I’ve ever taught. By this I mean that, at times, her demeanor is tough. Her language is tough. And she would admit parts of her background are pretty tough, too. I also mean she is probably one of the brightest , most earnest, most hardworking students I have ever met, and it was tough to teach her when I knew she was struggling with money and family and relationships and her vision for the future and her own sense of herself. She approached the writing and the reading with an enthusiasm that made our classroom time together a joy, but I also spent many hours outside the classroom dealing with her extracurricular challenges, exhausting the resources and services at my college, and trying to come to terms with my limits as an educator. Put simply, research on student retention tries to determine why a student like Helen might leave college after one semester , why others stay, and whether or not there is anything we can do to influence these decisions; the goal of such research is to figure out ways to keep as many students as possible enrolled in a particular institution. But the issue of retention is hardly simple , and it raises some particularly compelling questions about our own roles as educators. Helen was a tough student to teach because I didn’t face a day during the semester she was enrolled in my class without confronting these questions: Is higher education a right or a privilege? What is the purpose of higher education ? What does “success” in college mean? And what role does writing instruction play in answers to these questions? This chapter tells Helen’s story. I got to know Helen both as a participant in the Student Faculty Partnership for Success program (which I describe in the introduction) and as a student in my Writing and Rhetoric course. Like the other students I discuss in this book, she also sat down for a long recorded and 32   pegeen reichert p owell transcribed interview while she was still enrolled in my college. (I return to Helen’s story in chapter 4, and in that chapter, I draw on a second interview, conducted two and a half years later.)1 On one hand, the peculiarities of Helen’s experiences, behaviors, and personality traits undermine much of what we think we know about retention—who leaves and how to prevent that from happening—and thus her story lays the groundwork for a critique of the discourse of retention, which I continue in chapter 2. On the other hand, the picture that emerges of a bright and engaged student who drops out of college after one semester compels me to ask important questions about my goals as a writing instructor and my responsibilities to teach students like Helen who may never graduate, at least not from the college where I taught them, questions I take up in chapters 3 and 4. Helen in many ways represents the larger population of students who are at risk for leaving college before graduation, who may or may not transfer to other institutions or return later to achieve the degree. We hear in her story many of the “risk factors ” the data tell us to look for when trying to determine who might leave. She is representative, too, because, paradoxically, her story is unique—I believe it is nearly impossible to extrapolate from this one case any useful generalizations about retention . I am inclined to argue that all students are unique in this way. Getting to know her, like getting to know the other students I write about in this book, has taught me just how much we don’t know, and how much we may never be able to know, about the reasons some students leave and other students stay.2 In this chapter, I put Helen’s story next to a discussion of some of the dominant strains of retention scholarship. I begin with a brief history of retention research to provide some necessary context. Then, I juxtapose Helen’s narrative with highlights from recent retention research in order to illustrate the difficulties of going back and forth between students’ voices and research, the struggle to reconcile both of these discourses into one tidy narrative, and...