Breaking the Silence, Reimagining Justice: Voices of Returning Women Students in Community College

Instructions

To write about age you need to take something and break it.

(This is an art that has always loved young women. And silent ones.)

A branch, perhaps, girlish with blossom. Snapped off. Close to the sap.

Then cut through a promised summer. Continue. Cut down to the root.

The spring afternoon will come to your door, angry as any mother. Ignore her.

Now take syntax. Break that too. What is left is for you and you only:

A dead tree. The future. What does not bear fruit. Or thinking of.¹

(Boland 77)

I was expecting essays. As I waited in the classroom to receive final take-home exams for my Global Women's Studies class, Sylvia arrived with a wall-sized three-panel collage that she had created in response to the final writing assignment. She had taken many of the concepts presented over the semester and artistically translated them into a complex and beautiful visual representation. Sylvia had done the intellectual work that I hope to see in my students. She took ownership of the ideas and thought deeply about and created relationships between topics; she reshaped, synthesized, and represented her learning "in her own words." Sylvia's learning was far deeper than many of my students who can easily pen a required reflection essay; yet visual art does not meet the course requirements for students to demonstrate competence in my course. Sylvia is a returning student, coming back to community college in her fifties to complete a degree. Although she rarely missed class and bravely participated in discussions, she did not submit writing assignments. As Sylvia presented her artwork to me, she shared, "I couldn't say what I know in writing, but I knew that I could in art." What grade should I assign? I found myself holding my academic standards in one hand and my student's unique expression of course literacy in the other.

As a woman in her fifties, Sylvia does not represent the everyday image of a college student and yet she is quite typical, especially at the community college where 59 percent of students are nontraditional-age, including 10 percent of her peers who are over age forty ("Research Trends"). While nontraditional-age students are a significant proportion of the overall undergraduate student population in the United States, numbering over 40 percent in 2015, returning students like Sylvia are more likely to attend community colleges due to affordability and flexibility ("Characteristics of Postsecondary Students"). Sylvia is a member of the 57 percent of community college students who are women. It is not surprising to see an older woman student like Sylvia at the community college; what is remarkable is the lack of representation. In her poem entitled "I met a woman who wasn't there," Marge Piercy writes of the invisibility that older women experience—a few selected lines express this reality:

In middle age … we begin to vanish. Walk through a lobby, a crowded airport: men, children will run into you in the obvious opinion you cannot possibly exist. We are inaudible too. We speak and people turn away. Although we know more, our opinions are dust on the wind. Nobody collects or records them (1).

Another student in her fifties shared similar feelings with me one day after class, "We are invisible in the imagination of the college."²

I did not set out to think about my feminist pedagogy or issues of justice when I designed a study of returning women students at the community college where I teach. I set out to "break something"—the silence about age. I set out to collect and record the opinions of older women. Like Sylvia, I had been a returning student. My experience was at the upper division and graduate levels of the university; although I was privileged compared with many women who return at the community college, I felt considerable anxiety and isolation related to my identity as an older student. When I tried to reach out and talk with my oftentimes younger professors about my difficulties...