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95 Chapter 3 Family, School, Community: Vehicles to Realized Potential Using many of my own family, school, and community experiences as a bridge to understanding the participants in this study, I considered the manner of individual from a low SES background who becomes the first in his or her family to attend college, to earn a college degree, and to choose social or educational activism as an avocation. I began to examine the participants’ self-concepts at various crucial points in their lives, with particular attention given to those forces that helped to shape their emerging identities . I searched for clues in their early familial and environmental experiences in an effort to understand the foundations supporting their later academic, social, and economic successes. In a similar vein, I examined their family and life experiences in order to illuminate those processes by which they attained their particular senses of self, their drive to succeed, and their knowledge of how to make success possible. In a very real way, my quest has been to understand a complex question: Who are these people whose stories form the basis of this study? Instinctively I understood that the question’s potential to appear presumptuous and intimidating to the participants could very well equal its complexity and importance to the study. As a good-faith measure, I declared my identity as a first-generation college graduate and shared with the participants relevant parts of my experience at appropriate points in the interview process. This practice seemed to lessen the emotional distance between me and individual participants even as it provided me with an empathetic framework from which to approach the study. The interviews I conducted are replete with many of the findings already reported in the literature, yet they offer rich insights and understandings that help to build upon what we already know about first-generation college students . For instance, I was surprised to find that almost three-fourths of the participants in the study indicated that they were singled out in some way or made to feel special when they were quite young. Eight years is the oldest age 96 Building a Rock Foundation reported by any of these participants at the onset of their “special status,” and only one participant reported being as old as eight at the onset. Clearly distinguishable from the family-external “teacher’s pet” syndrome, special-status children appear to enjoy an enhanced position within the confines of the family , or in comparison to other family members. Because so many of the participants included some discussion of themselves as special-status children in their life histories, I wondered whether such status plays a role in the likelihood that a child will be able to achieve the remarkable—that is, to become the first in the family to go to college. This question is explored in the first section of this chapter. In the second section of the chapter, I deal with another surprise finding: the impact on academic success of a phenomenon that I refer to as “positive naming.” Two-thirds of the people that I interviewed discussed individuals in their lives who gave them an affirming label or identifier based on a genuine assessment of the interviewee’s personal qualities. According to the participants, the effects of positive naming on their lives were pivotal in helping them to improve their self-images, set high goals for themselves, believe in their capability to achieve those goals, and develop and pursue strategies toward their realization. Since the participants’ accounts of the roles that others’ high expectations played in their academic successes do not differ markedly from past findings, the brief discussion of expectations in this chapter serves primarily as a means of accentuating its distinctiveness from positive naming. In addition to more discrete factors such as special status, positive naming, and others’ expectations, consideration of the spectrum of variables that affected the matriculation and success at college of the first-generation students in this study reveals various findings related to home and school. For instance, only three had parents who completed high school, and many had at least one parent who was functionally illiterate. A related finding showed that only the two youngest participants had believed all their lives that they could go to college. While this data suggests a considerable amount about the low degree of assurance with which first-generation college students may think about attending college, the interviewees in this study repeatedly emphasized that the degree of parental...

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